Tuesday, August 10, 2010
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Tuesday, August 10, 2010
MOVIE REVIEW
Countdown To Zero
The Doomsday Clock Goes
Tick-Tick Tock, Tick-Tick Tock...
No fries with this, only eternal suffering: a moment from
Lucy Walker's documentary "Countdown To Zero".
Magnolia Pictures
by
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com
FOLLOW
Sunday, August
8, 2010
The summer's biggest horror movie isn't "Splice" or "Predators" or even April's
"The Human Centipede". It surely is "Countdown To Zero", the only true
horror story of the films mentioned, yet many will have little interest in
seeing Lucy Walker's important documentary. The film is making its way
around the U.S. in limited release.
You may have seen cities around the globe disintegrate in the blink of an eye in
fiction films like "2012" and countless others, but "Countdown To Zero" presents
the all-too-real "what ifs" regarding nuclear war and the pandemic catastrophe
that would ensue. As terrifying and disturbing as the dramatic BBC
television film
"Threads" (1984), one of the most deeply disturbing experiences, "Countdown
To Zero" appears to be a benign documentary on its face but is an illustration
of just how easy it is to destroy humankind as we know it.
Interviews with former world leaders, ex-CIA agents and nuclear physicists and
academicians reveal the dangers of nuclear proliferation. "Of course, the
more secure a nuclear weapon is the more unusable it is," says one interviewee
during the film. The comment crystallizes the film's quandaries. One
moment of somber nostalgia involves Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader,
he of perestroika and glasnost, recalling
the disappointment of the nuclear arms race treaty summit talks in Reykjavik in
1986 with then-U.S. president Ronald Reagan.
The film also mixes learned experts with person-on-the-street interviews in
world cities around the world about the countries that may or may not possess
nuclear arsenals. What lets "Countdown To Zero" down a few pegs are the
propagandistic fears of weaponry in the "wrong hands" (typically thought by many
to mean Middle Eastern nations), when history shows that the only country that
has dropped nuclear or atomic weapons of any kind on another nation is the
United States.
While the Middle East and North Korea are legitimate concerns in the burgeoning
arms race, gaps in the historical narrative are glossed over in the film,
including the well-known fact Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction
for years prior to or during or after
the infamous 48 hour-warning issued by former president George W. Bush on March
17, 2003.
Watching "Countdown To Zero" is undoubtedly an uncomfortable experience.
It is, at best, a cautionary look at the prospect of human annihilation, and
just how close we've come to it over recent decades. Like "An Inconvenient
Truth" (both partnered with Participant Media) it is a thought-provoking film,
which despite its flaws get its message across clearly and succinctly as a call
to action, not to arms.
"Countdown to Zero"
is rated PG by the Motion Picture
Association Of America for thematic material, images of destruction and
incidental smoking. The film's
running time is one hour and 31 minutes.
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