This early effort by Mick Jackson, he of The Bodyguard. LA Story and errr, Volcano, fame is a more battered, scratchy, affair made on a budget with an edgy kitchen sink realism about it. The story and point being made are all the better for it.

We are treated to a washed-out aesthetic as everyone in 1984 Sheffield go about their lives. Drinking down the pub, shopping, going to work. All the time in the background, through the realistic medium of newspaper headlines, Lesley Judd of Blue Peter reading the news and radio announcements the creeping disaster that is the whole point of the story edges forward. It is clever and works well. The realistic drama style is somewhat counterpointed by a documentary feel with on-screen text telling us where we are in the timeline. I am not sure whether this works or clashes with the fictional tale and days after viewing I still cannot make my mind up.
Probably due to budget restraints, but I think also for realism, Jackson used a cast of relative unknowns, and all involved give great showings as ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Great writing gives all the main characters little knowledge or interest in the event unfolding, until things start to get out of hand. To balance this, we are shown the leader of the council who is designated the emergency manager being told to be ‘be ready’ to run the local area in the event of a war. It is this strand of the narrative that arguably gives us the weakest part of the film when later on we do get treated to some very stagey histrionics in the ‘bunker’ under the town hall, it is not ‘11’ but it could have dialled down a bit methinks.

Part of the morbid interest is to see what happens once the war starts, who survives, who makes errors, who is wiped out. If there is any criticism, I think Jackson and the writer, Barry Hines, who wrote A Kestrel for a Knave, so definitely knew about the northern working-class realism, were too optimistic, allowing more than a few characters to survive the initial blast. The events prior to the strike are mundane and ordinary to the point of the opening set-ups perhaps starting to drag. The unfolding news flashed about Iraq and the oilfields are both realistically made and very slowly rack up the tension.

The events of the nuclear strikes and the results no doubt were horrifying to audiences at the time but once again I cannot help feeling that the real circumstance would be more terrifying and apocalyptic and of course Jackson was certainly hamstrung by costs.

If I have any major criticism the tale of Ruth carries on way too long after the events and we are projected too far into the future and so are greeted with pure fiction and speculation. It is as if the story was pivoting around nuclear strikes on the UK but once that has occurred, the devastation is framed, highlighted, then air gets let out of the tyres and we trundle to the end.

Nevertheless, is this a small complaint and if you are lucky enough to view this, not only do you get to see Reece Dinsdale in an exceedingly early role but probably the best ‘realistic’ film made about a nuclear war out of the small crop of films the popped up around and after it came out. Even today, outdated as it is, it still packs a punch.

Should you read people’s opinions on this it does show how a portion of the population really need films like this to hammer home exactly what the proliferation of nuclear weapons is about. I have read comments saying such as ‘it opened my eyes’ and ‘I never realised it would be so devastating. I am not sure I can understand how people could, and do, think a few hundred megatons of nuclear weapons dumped strategically over the UK would be ‘survivable’?

A film that should, but never will be shown to older school children and all MPs every year. It never will because no one in power would like people to know they are going to burst into flames or die from radiation sickness after a war that no one wins, and certainly can you imagine today’s politicians wanting people to see that should the worst happen, they will lose control and society will collapse within a few weeks? Can you imagine your government being clueless in a serious situation?

Dated, grainy, and depressing, everyone should watch Threads at least once.

This film was, for many, a turning-point regarding nuclear weapons, the cold war and nuclear-politics.

Set in a 1984 UK industrial-suburbia, as the cold war gets hot, we follow regular people in their daily lives and how they prepare for the coming apocalypse.

Barry Hines and Mick Jackson explains and shows us how the world is interconnected and woven together, each strand in this web is dependent on the others and when the threads start to break, the webbing that hold society together, unravel and we are quickly left with hardship and irreparable loss.

There is no help from the outside, as most places are left in the same sorry state.

With the lingering pollution from the war, there is only one way human kind can go from there.

This film has no high-notes and there are no cheesy Hollywood-lines to comfort you during the viewing, just cold-hard facts and statistic.

When the inevitable starts, we follow Ruth in particular, the main character, on her journey, 13 years into the future. We see how she tries to cope, as the remnants of the industrial world and human kind slowly crumble and whither around her.

The film use simple effects and has a natural gritty style.
This prevents the film from looking too dated. In addition, most of the film work with limited sets and scenes, so the time-period it is shot in, is somewhat removed from the story and experience.

The acting is real and very good, they are real people, playing real people, 'no time for plastic Hollywood-figures here'.

What we are left with, is most likely one of the bleakest, grimmest and most depressing film, that everyone needs to see at least once.

It will remain a testament to the cold war, but as long as there are nuclear weapons, it will continue to be an ever-relevant warning.

It will stick with you indefinitely.

Once again, I struggled to understand the British English. At least this time, I didn't really need to. Not a word needed to be spoken to convey the very real horror we might all be subjected to. Now, closer to that armageddon than ever before in our history. I just hope I die in the initial blast. The after is actually worse than the blast itself. God help us all.