The Day After (1983)
Directed by Nicholas Meyer
In the mid-1980s, the U.S. is poised on the brink of nuclear war. This shadow looms over the residents of a small town in Kansas as they continue their daily lives. Dr. Russell Oakes maintains his busy schedule at the hospital, Denise Dahlberg prepares for her upcoming wedding, and Stephen Klein is deep in his graduate studies. When the unthinkable happens and the bombs come down, the town's residents are thrust into the horrors of nuclear winter.
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What critics compared The Day After to
Nuclear missile horror stories used to be more frequent in the years after the Cold War first heated up, most famously 1964’s accidental diptych Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove, followed by 1983’s accidental diptych WarGames and The Day After.
…feels like a twenty first century’s unofficial somber prequel to “The Day After” (1983)…
A House of Dynamite’s status as a cautionary tale also places it in the tradition of Cold War–era dramas like Fail Safe and The Day After…
…with cultural phenomena like “The Day After” and “99 Luftbaloons” constantly reminding us how close we were to extinction.
I remember as a curious 6-year-old kid being terrified by the TV movie The Day After, which looked at the repercussions of a nuclear conflict.
In November of 1983, the ABC television network aired a movie called The Day After that imagined what it would be like if nuclear bombs struck the United States.
A hodgepodge of everything from Alien to Event Horizon to an episode of “Fringe” to Back to the Future to an H.P. Lovecraft story to the classic 1983 television movie The Day After , to call this effort a mess would be massively understating things.
With Hillcoat behind the lens, it’s like Kevin Smith managing The Day After.
From the cheesy dialogue and paranoid conservatism to the gleeful defilement of national monuments, this is Earth vs. the Flying Saucers from 1956--albeit updated for the '90s via Star Wars, Alien, Top Gun, and T2, and then filtered through the '70s disaster genre and that awful TV movie from the nuclear-scare era, The Day After.
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Take the terrifying attack segment of The Day After that shows no quarter or how the boat was rendered secondary to a love story in Titanic .
I didn’t, really, given that this falls pretty low on the Come and See scale of soul-quaking eye-opening pain for me, frankly (a recent rewatch of The Day After , with all of its camp trappings, disturbed me far more than this ever would), but I recognize that I will probably be alone in that opinion.
The essential sadness and irony of the character informs Godzilla , bleeding through into a script that namechecks Hiroshima (just as The Wolverine namechecks Nagasaki) and circles around the peril of EMPs in exactly the same way The Day After nuclear armageddon cycle did--making the movie both a child of the '80s and a backwards-looking lament at the places technology has brought us and our ownership of the whole mess.
There are times when "Dredd 3D" feels like an escapist companion piece to "The Day After."
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Emmerich’s Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow may have been dopey, but both were carried off with a certain degree of panache, and ID at least gave us the lingering image of the White House being blown to smithereens by invading aliens.
Dawn of the Dead opens gangbusters, its prologue--which segues into a title montage scored just right to Johnny Cash tune--the most nihilistic-feeling bit of cinema I've seen since the first broadcast of The Day After, and right in line with our apocalyptic cinema environment.