Imagining the Unimaginable

The War Game, Suppose the Bomb were dropped on England. Who would survive? What would daily life be like? Would the living envy the dead?

Focusing on a handful of ordinary citizens in Kent, this 47-minute film begins with coolly British preparations for a conventional war--rational rationing, orderly evacuation to the safe suburbs. Abruptly, a nuclear bomb explodes off-camera. The screen whitens with the flash, then rumbles with the shock wave. The sound, intones an off-screen narrator, is "like an enormous door slamming in hell." Children with seared eyes grope for help, fires rage incessantly, food riots begin. The police execute looters--and then turn on the hopelessly ill, shooting them down like horses as they writhe outside the hospital that can no longer help them. At last, apathy envelops the populace like a thick London fog. Asked what they want to be when they grow up, little boys listlessly reply, "I don't want to be nothin'."

Directed in grainy, neorealistic style by Peter Watkihs, 31, The War Game was commissioned by BBC-TV (which eventually decided that it was too gruesome for home viewing), and won an Oscar as the year's best feature documentary. For the most part, Watkins plays his horror story straight and as close to reality as possible: scenes showing the collapse of order, for instance, are based on the record of civilian be havior at Hiroshima, Dresden and other cities devastated during World War II. Sometimes, though, Watkins' passion for peace leads him into moments of maudlin melodramatics. At film's end, the sound track unconvincingly takes the press and television to task for supposedly refusing to discuss the possibilities of nuclear war, and asks: "Is there a real hope to be found in this silence?" And one scene of nuclear holocaust is accompanied by the strains of Silent Night, ludicrously amplifying a potential tragedy that certainly needs no enlargement.

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