The War Game Reviews

worth watching but.....

An interesting, well made, and scary exploration of the likely effects of a nuclear strike on Britain during the cold war.

Whilst the film provides a useful reality check on the horrific effects of nuclear war it is shamelessly unilaterist.The film portrays deterrence as an idiotic policy that just invites attack and the catastrophe portrayed in the film.

With the benefit of hindsight mutually assured destruction based deterrence did work. After all, we are all still here.

The film is also flawed by its assumption of moral equivilence between the Warsaw pact dictatorships and NATO democracies. A world dominated by repressive dictatorships unchecked by a disarmed west would't have been worth living in.'Imagine a boot treading on a human face forever'(Orwel I think).

A classic from a master

One of the greatest TV films ever made, banned for twenty years, and still impressive when it was finally shown, probably as a result of the renewed interest in the Bomb.

Filmed in a natural realistic documentary style, with a amateur unknown cast, you thought you where watching newsreel footage of the real thing.

In fact the head of Granada TV, when he saw one of Watkins earlier films, On the Hungry Uprising, said that they couldn't show it on television, because it was so lifelike, that nobody would believe our own newsreels.

Peter Watkins showed great promise and was regarded as the English Orson Welles. But the establishment don't like the film, and he didn't make any more films for the BBC, which is a great loss for television and unfortunately the future of television, instead of going the Watkins way, went down the careful path of what we now have as safe less troublesome sanitised propaganda.

It also appears that the Beatles Manager Brian Epstein, offered to have the film distributed in cinemas with no profit to himself and Peter Watkins also influenced John and Yoko's to start their peace campaign

Watkins has made films since then, but doesn't appear to have gone back to mainstream British television.

Controversial documentary justifies its reputation

"The War Game" is a seminal and powerful BBC-produced film, serving as a disturbingly effective piece of agit-prop from director Pete Walker. This 45-minute piece shows how utterly unprepared 1960's Britain was for a nuclear conflict, the truths that had been hidden from the public and the devastating results of a nuclear attack. It's certainly powerful and emotive stuff, and with excellent photography (shot black and white in a hand-held documentary style), and all-round decent performances, its little wonder that the government of the day basically forced the BBC to ban this from television for over 20 years. I definitely recommend checking this out.

Should It Have Been Shown?

This is horrifying stuff, but I can't help but think that not airing it originally was not the right decision. Time has surely proved that it was, in fact, pointless scaremongering. In his arch determination to seek out the bleakest of worst-case scenarios, Watkins yet again stifles any nod to subtlety with militantly aggressive bombast.

As a "historical" artefact this is well worth seeing, but if you're expecting modern effects forget it, this was made in the sixties!

easy to see why the film was originally banned by the government, even in todays climate the subject matter is both relevant, thought-provoking a nd frightening.

Best of the bunch

The War Game is much better than the vacuous 'The Day After' and 'Threads', and I could still remember many scenes from watching the film's first TV release back in 1985. Watching it again on DVD, it's clear why it won an Oscar for best documentary back in the mid 60s, even if it is very cinematically dated, today. But the director's naive hypothesis that leaving ourselves defenceless to attack by a totalitarian state should be the best form of defence is all the more inane today than it was when the Soviet Union actually existed, and this grates all the way through the DVD. History has consigned this film to the box marked 'knickknacks', at best.

Dated but interesting

This banned BBC drama/documentary production from the cold war era was way ahead of it's time.

It is dramatic with some reasonable special effect make up, and quite good production values. It caused a stir within the government at the time, who didn't really want Joe public to see how futile the "Protect & Survive" nonsense was.

The directors commentary is quite revealing, and shows how the film must have ruffled a few BBC and Government feathers to be hidden away for over 20 years.

You won't recognise anyone in the cast, but you will remember the film! Interesting and worth a look. Now where did I put my H bomb proof window tape!

Worth checking out if you studying this sort of thing.

If you do film studies, politics or whatever that is the do with the theme of this film then it's worth checking out. I checked it out because i was blown away by Peter Watkins' 'Punishment Park.' And also a few years ago i had seen a programme discussuing 'The War Game,' so bin wanting to check it out. In all honesty i dunno what to make of this film. I liked the brutual reality of it. After all it's a film about the affects of nuclear war. So taming it to suit TV bosses/audiences would be wrong. Though there was two things i found at fault. Part of it is very dated - for example i didn't have a clue what was actual fact cos there was no sourcing, where as today sources are acknowledged. The other part was that if it was trying to influence people to show protest against government funding of nuclear warheads etc, then they weren't going to influence much change. Because which government is going to weaking their arsenal, just because the nation wants them to? So even an updated version of this programme wouldn't stand for much purpose in my opinion. Like i say though tis worth checking out if your studies cover this sort of theme.

Very interesting

This is a very interesting piece of 60's documentary, made just 20 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of course.

I enjoyed the contrast between what the government was telling the populace, and what the film shows.

The extra about how the film was suppressed was also very interesting, I'd always assumed it was suppressed on taste grounds, but...

Holy Nuclear Holocaust Batman!

I think it is fair to say that if I was a sixties family man, I would have packed the wife and kids off to Safeville, Arizona after watching this.

Right or wrong the beeb may have been, it is never the less easy to appreciate why they bottled broadcasting this little horror show.

Although elements of this documentary haven't dated well - big up to the no-budget BBC special effects boys - the events that this very matter of fact film predicts will follow a Hiroshima sized attack are proper scary m'lud.

Watch it for something different and historical, in the sense that if you imagine you are that sixties family man, you can appreciate what events like the Cuban Missile Crisis really meant.