The War Game (1966, Peter Watkins) (Patreon)

54/100

As good as propaganda gets—I'm just not keen, in an artistic context, on messaging this overt, even for the noblest of causes (e.g. "Maybe let's not continue down an obviously self-annihilating path"). My primary issue with Threads (rating: 66/100), this film's remake-in-all-but-name, is its superfluous voiceover narration, prodding us to take the nuclear threat seriously by coming right out and saying "Behold what will happen if we don't." The War Game rarely deviates from that didactic mode, dispensing altogether with characters and story, never even really pretending to be anything other than a brutal scare tactic. And its made-for-TV brevity—trim just four minutes and I'd designate it a short—reinforces the sense of an "industrial" work, separate from both fictional narratives and documentaries. Which is a longwinded way of saying that I'm not quite sure what to do with it, apart from acknowledge that it gets the job done. 

Admittedly, Watkins was in the process of pioneering a new cinematic mode—one that informed his entire career, from what I can gather (though Punishment Park is the only other feature I've seen at this writing). And there's no denying that his replication of then-contemporaneous TV journalism lent The War Game a chilling frisson that we can only partly imagine now, decades removed. Nobody mistook it for an actual news report (in large part because it wasn't aired on British television until 1985, post-Threads), but you can nonetheless trace a line to Watkins' methodology straight from the Mercury Theatre's 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, which likewise fashioned a credible apocalypse primarily from the audience's familiarity with prevalent nonfiction technique. 

Even formally, though, this film seems to me far more effective when it's less pushy about its intentions. There's a bracing power to uninflected medium shots in which actors re-create damning or dangerously wrongheaded statements taken directly from the historical record; juxtaposing those mock-doc interviews with hypothetical nightmares that contradict them serves only to undermine said power, creating cheap gotcha! moments that rely upon assumptions about the disparity between official policy and grim reality. (Almost certainly accurate assumptions, but still.) Again, though, this is "cheap" only within parameters that the film itself couldn't possibly care less about—it's as if I'm faulting a Nicholas Sparks adaptation for being shamelessly mawkish in its romanticism. Best I can do is point to Threads as my preferred approach: every bit as horrific (in fairness, whichever one of these films one sees first holds a considerable advantage in terms of pure shock value), but contextualizing its horrors within a framework that feels—for the most part—like a movie rather than a polemic.