Hacker Cinema
Special Bulletin
1983 · Film · 103 min
Directed by Edward Zwick
An evening of TV programming is interrupted by breaking news: in Charleston, South Carolina, two Coast Guard personnel and two members of a local news team have been taken hostage by a group of terrorists who are seeking to destroy the triggers of all local nuclear devices. Moreover, the terrorists threaten to detonate their own device if their demands are not met.
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I love pseudo-documentary and pseudo-newscast movies, ever since I watched Without Warning [0] and had to sleep on my parents' floor because it felt too real for me.
Special Bulletin [1] is another good one.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Without_Warning_(1994_film)
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special_Bulletin&wprov=rarw1
An almost forgotten TV movie that aired before "The Day After" was "Special Bulletin", about nuclear terrorism in the United States, presented as a series of live news reports, as "War of the Worlds" was by Orson Welles' radio program in the 1930s.
Riveting and disturbing in a way that network TV virtually never was at the time.
The context is Zwick's show "Special Bulletin", which was a TV film done in the style of a breaking news story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Bulletin
And there was a bunch of primetime TV content about the nuclear apocalypse when a large part of Gen X was at an impressionable age.
"Threads" (UK), "The Day After" (US) are two big ones. Two lesser known ones that had a profound impact on me were "Special Bulletin" and an episode of the new Twilight Zone called "A Little Piece and Quiet"[1]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or1UX7z8YBM .. this run of the new TZ had many episodes about nuclear destruction
I know this is a bit adjacent, but I always come across this sort of movie when I encounter another small genre of films, which is the documentary-style sci-fi. Following in the vein of Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds’ “News report” these are sci-fi presented as non-fiction. The one I witnessed in real-time was Without Warning but have since discovered Alternative 3 and Special Bulletin It’s a fascinating genre as television used to be much more trusted, like radio before it, and the internet has I think gone through the same transformation. And it’s fascinating that each of these productions thought “No way people will think it’s real…”
Anyway, kind of fun to watch (kind of)
[0] Without Warning https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6J4pfT2qLb4
[1] Alternative 3 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7YHrCAQ1Dlg
[2] Special Bulletin https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cDZQsVNZ3SE
The only movie to give me nightmares and sleepless nights. The Day After had little impact on me but Threads was on a whole different level.
For some reason I also still remember a scene from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Bulletin - the news crew trying to understand why the NEST bomb squad was running away just before cutting out...
Another is Countdown to Looking Glass. It starts out as being told through live news reports although I guess the writers couldn't find a way to maintain that type of storytelling through the whole movie.
Although it's not nuclear war, a better example in the same vein is Special Bulletin.