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Karen Meagher, Reece Dinsdale, David Brierly

Documentary style account of a nuclear holocaust and it's effect on the working class city of Sheffield, England; and the eventual long run affects of nuclear war on civilization.

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94% liked it

1,632 ratings

Unrated

Directed by: Mick Jackson

Release Date: September 23, 1984

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Flixster Reviews (271)

  • bort16
    June 30, 2009
    bort16
    The 1980s were awash with post-nuclear apocalyptic films. The atmosphere during the Cold War was tantamount to sociological paranoid schizophrenia. As those kind of movies pointed out, it wasn't an entirely unreasonable mindset. With the emotional strings of mass public ripe for ...( read more)pulling, movie execs put out as many apocalyptic films as possible to fill what was for a time a hollow quota. Like any mass produced product, most were forgettable at best, some endearing simply for their subject matter and aims (when not jingoistic propaganda), and few actually top quality, even fewer bonified art. While movie houses were churning out profit racking money traps, how interesting that one of the very best of the genre was made as a TV docudrama by the BBC (another excellent film, which I'll also review, was also made for tv in the US, Testament, though when producers saw its quality, they pushed it on to the big screen).
    Threads amounts to a by the numbers procedural. The film begins with the story of a young couple, pregnant, and contemplating their future. We meet their families, and others, among them a political bureaucrat. The first half of the movie deals with the buildup to war. TV reports telecast news of escalating confrontations between the US and USSR. War breaks out and nukes are used. Protests mount in the streets as the UK becomes trapped in the nuclear vortex. Inevitably, bombs begin to fall on it.
    When the nuclear strikes occur, the imagery is frightening and unforgettable. But it's the aftermath that truly gives Threads its disturbing legacy legitimacy. Most of the rest of the film focuses on Ruth, the pregnant fiance. She stays with her parents in their ruined flat for a time, then goes out into the streets of Sheffield in search of her lover, and then eventually just food and a means of surviving. The area is reduced to rubble, and it is assumed with the amount of fighting reported before the blasts that so is everywhere else. Nuclear dust clogs the skies, there is no sunlight to be seen. Those who are not dying from fallout are dying of hunger, or possibly marauding bands of looters, or even the ruthless guns of the authorities. Ruth eventually has her child, a daughter. The movies jumps forwards in time, throughout the time of the initial survivors, to the nuclear children, the next generation.
    The movie is punctuated by on screen statistics, providing us with information we'd rather not be privy to. A voice occasionally briefly narrates as if it were a real documentary. But the real star is the imagery. Threads has no standard plot so to speak, but simply follows. There is a beginning, but no middle. The end, however, is quite symbolically the end. There is little hope in the film. What hope their is is provided by ourselves and our own internal predilection for optimism. By some turns, Threads is overbearingly pessimistic, others though insist it may be optimistic. If the latter is correct, let me be vapourized upon impact, please.
    Stylistically, Threads is barren, dirty, bloody, uninhabitable. The filmmakers do a painfully good job considering the technology of the 80s. The storm of dialogue coming from all angles in the beginning half of the film - from people, from radios, and tvs, often simultaneously - gives way to screams of panic and desperation, and finally to near silence. The final acts of the film are most without dialogue, what there is is sparse and passe. After all, as it is said, the world goes out not with a bang, but a whimper.
  • ClintonKirk
    January 31, 2008
    ClintonKirk
    "Threads" makes "The Day After" look like "Billy Madison" by comparison. Just about the most horrifying version of nuclear war you'll ever be likely to see, and likely as intense as most people can handle. I would not recommend this to the majority of people. I'm a little frea...( read more)ked out even thinking about it. Definitely realistic and no hope of a happy ending.
  • alanjayh
    June 13, 2008
    alanjayh
    brutal stuff!!! very realistic, this is graphic and morbid..ultimately depressing..but movie production values are high and not much is held back...not exactly entertaining but is gripping drama if apocalypse genre is your thing...
  • g0y
    September 10, 2009
    g0y
    Only works on you if you're scared of death. Average movie in my eyes.
  • eishe
    August 17, 2009
    eishe
    In my opinion, every person, who has the ability to push the "big red" button on the Nuclear Bomb launching mechanism should be forced to watch this film. Preferably twice.
    Threads paints a haunting image of the beginning, occurrence and aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. It brig...( read more)htly shows the actions of gouvernment and regular people from various social classes when the threads that unite our society together are torn.
    Threads isn't a pretty movie, in fact watching this film for the first time froze any emotions I had towards the post-nuclear genre for a week or so. However, after the initial shock was gone, my love for the genre was only intensified.
  • xbrandoncopex
    July 16, 2009
    xbrandoncopex
    Watching this will make you cringe in horror at the realistic after effects of a nuclear holocaust.
  • robertovinicius
    July 5, 2009
    robertovinicius
    Most disturb movies 15-15
  • RThornhill
    July 1, 2009
    RThornhill
    recommended by bort16.
  • mpghoul1973
    May 6, 2009
    mpghoul1973
    This is seriously one of the scariest films ive ever seen in my life. It will punch you in your gut then ass rape you while your down!
    Very well made account of what would happen in the event of a global holocaust. This film goes beyond what one could imagine. And ends with no ...( read more)hope what so ever. I imagine the way this movie plays out is what really would happen. This IS the best and most realistic nuclear survival film ever made. Itll stick with you and depress the hell out of you!
  • Budgeburgess
    April 18, 2009
    Budgeburgess
    Written by Barry Hines, "Threads" is drama documentary made by the BBC and shown on British television in 1984. It echoes an earlier warning of the likely impact of nuclear war ("The War Game", scheduled for broadcast 1965 but banned by the BBC until 1985 on the grounds that wh...( read more)at it portrayed was too shocking - it did the rounds of art cinemas, college film societies, and viewings organised by anti-war activists).

    "Threads" follows the impact of a nuclear war on two working class families and an ordinary council chief executive in the English city of Sheffield. It emphasises the lack of preparedness for nuclear war by beginning its story three months before the missile strikes occur. While the daily lives of the protagonists follow a mundane course, we are given glimpses of television news coverage of an escalating international crisis - news coverage which is largely ignored by the mass of the population.

    Only in the last few days does some degree of concern become widespread - even then largely confined to a run on food supplies and, finally, by an attempt to flee the city and find refuge in the country. The UK, of course, is a densely packed little island - there are few places or spaces which could offer anything purporting to be 'refuge', and certainly not enough to sustain the population fleeing from the cities.

    The film follows the slow, almost innocuous build up to war - contrasting it with the panic and immediate collapse of society's structures as the first mushroom clouds loom over British cities. The portrayal of terror and devastation is graphic - cities ablaze as fire storms sweep across them, survivors left blinded, burned, badly injured, and traumatised. Those who opt to follow the government of the day's 'protect and survive' policies - building shelters within their homes out of doors and bits of furniture - succumb to the effects of fall-out and die a slow death in their houses.

    Those who remain fit and active have to fight for food - and have to find somewhere to live (most of the housing stock will have been rendered uninhabitable). Law and order break down - the seat of local government is reduced to shambolic chaos, buried under the ruins of its municipal buildings. The surviving police and military institute martial law and try to cope with the disposal of the dead. Medical and emergency services are overwhelmed. And the effects of fall-out are yet to come.

    The theme, 'threads', emphasises that modern societies are utterly dependent on a sophisticated interplay and interconnection of many things - from basic gas, water, electricity, sewage, road, rail, and distribution systems, to communications, agriculture, industry, local government, a functioning Health Service, respect for law and order (by and large), and assumed access to food supplies and the income with which to buy goods (including food, accommodation, transport, and all the necessities of life). Nuclear war severs all the threads, fragments society into tales of individual survival.

    And following the nuclear devastation of the cities, there are the lasting effects of fall-out, and the immediate impact of nuclear winter as the explosions shut out sunlight and reduce agriculture to the stranglehold of an enduring absence of sun.

    The film follows the survivors over a number of years - perhaps its most chilling message. It suggests that any recovery from a nuclear strike would take decades, that for years afterwards the country would be reduced to chaos and to medieval technologies, with survivors living a primitive, hand-to-mouth existence, never sure from one day to the next what hope there might be for continued living.

    Utterly horrifying. Although nuclear weapons have become even more devastating in the years since this film was made, the message has not dated. It's a film which trivialises the Hollywood images of heroic survival in the face of Armageddon, a film which leaves you in abject terror of the possibility that such an atrocity could be perpetrated by human beings. It's a film which should be shown again and again until everyone appreciates that use of nuclear weapons leaves no winners and that the existence of nuclear weapons holds us all hostage to the certain prospect of becoming losers.

    The film is available online - search "Threads" and envy the dead.

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Threads Trivia

  • Who says this in LOTR:ROTK? "How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on... when in your heart... you begin to understand... there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep... that have taken hold".   Answer »
  • What film did the BBC make that showed a nuclear holocaust in the 1980s  Answer »
  • The nuclear apocalypse film, "Threads", is set in which British city.  Answer »
  • 'The Birds' (1963)- The scene where Tippy Hedren is ravaged by birds near the end of the movie took a week to shoot. The birds were attached to her clothes by long nylon threads so they could not get away.  Answer »
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