The War Game

The War Game is a 1966 British pseudo-documentary film that depicts a nuclear war and its aftermath. Written, directed and produced by Peter Watkins for the BBC, it caused dismay within the BBC and within government, and was withdrawn before the provisional screening date of 6 October 1965. The corporation said that "the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting. It will, however, be shown to invited audiences..."
The film premiered at the National Film Theatre in London, on 13 April 1966, where it ran until 3 May. It was then shown abroad at several film festivals, including Venice where it won the Special Prize. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1967.
The film was eventually televised in Great Britain on 31 July 1985, during the week before the fortieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the day before a repeat screening of Threads.
The film begins by describing Britain's nuclear deterrence policy of threatening would-be aggressors with devastation from the Royal Air Force's nuclear-armed V bombers. Due to the number of V bomber bases (particularly in a crisis situation that would see them dispersed throughout Britain), as well as major civilian targets in cities, Britain is described as having more potential nuclear weapon targets per acre than any other country.
On 15 September, American forces in South Vietnam are authorised to use tactical nuclear weapons in response to an ongoing Chinese invasion. The Soviet Union and East Germany threaten to invade West Berlin if America does not change course. The next day, the British government declares a state of emergency and transfers responsibility for Britain's day-to-day running to a body of regional commissioners. The first task of newly established emergency committees is the mass evacuation of children, mothers, and the infirm to various safe areas including Kent. Under threat of imprisonment, homeowners accommodate the evacuees, while unoccupied properties are requisitioned by the government. Rationing is implemented, booklets on how to prepare for nuclear attack are distributed, and emergency sirens are tested, with these being estimated to provide around three minutes' warning until impact, or under thirty seconds in the case of submarine attack. There are no government-built shelters, while efforts to build private ones are soon frustrated by a shortage of construction supplies.
On 18 September, the Soviets and East Germans invade West Berlin as previously threatened. NATO launches a counterattack, that is quickly overrun, resulting in the use of American tactical nuclear weapons. The Soviets immediately launch their own nuclear weapons at strategic targets, as their above-ground liquid-fuelled missiles are highly vulnerable to a NATO first strike.
In Kent, a one-megaton warhead air burst six miles from Canterbury devastates the city and its surrounding areas. At one house, a defence worker and a boy in the yard are struck by the heat wave, causing their eyeballs to melt. Furniture inside the house is ignited, and the building is then demolished by the shockwave. At another house, another boy suffers flash blindness as a consequence of looking directly at an explosion 27 miles away; his father carries him inside, and hides with the rest of his family under a table as the house is shaken by the distant shockwaves of successive explosions. In Rochester, an airburst causes a firestorm which sets the town ablaze. Meanwhile, British V bombers enter Soviet airspace to inflict similar devastation.
The attack overwhelms Kent's emergency services, with each surviving doctor being faced with at least 350 casualties. The worst-affected victims are left to die alone or shot by police as a form of mercy killing. Cases of PTSD occur among the survivors of the attacks. Dead bodies are disposed of by being burned; to prevent relatives from interfering, destroyed areas are sealed off, and police are routinely armed. Radiation sickness is rampant, while essential supplies and utilities are non-existent or severely limited.
The majority of Britain's remaining food supplies are reserved for those maintaining law and order, causing riots to break out over access to food and other resources. The riots soon turn into armed skirmishes between the authorities and desperate civilians; the latter are shown seizing a truck carrying a shipment of weapons and a food warehouse. Elsewhere, individuals convicted of causing civil disturbance or obstructing government officers are executed by police firing squads, with the father of the blinded boy from earlier in the film being among those shot. Due to food shortages, scurvy re-emerges as a consequence of a lack of easily-available vitamin C.
On Christmas Day in a Dover refugee facility, children orphaned in the attack are asked what they want to be when they grow up; they either "don't want to be nothing" or simply remain silent. Another child is described as only having seven bedridden years to live before dying from a chronic illness resembling leukemia, while an expectant mother who was exposed to radiation is unsure if she will suffer stillbirth. In closing, the real-world press is described as saying nothing about the dangers of nuclear weaponry.
The story is told in the style of a news magazine programme. It wavers between a pseudo-documentary and a drama film, with characters acknowledging the presence of the camera crew in some segments and others (in particular the nuclear attack) filmed as if the camera was not present. The combination of elements also qualifies it as a mondo film. It features several different strands that alternate throughout, including a documentary-style chronology of the main events, featuring reportage-like images of the war, the nuclear strikes, and their effects on civilians; brief contemporary interviews, in which passers-by are interviewed about what turns out to be their general lack of knowledge of nuclear war issues; optimistic commentary from public figures that clashes with the other images in the film; and fictional interviews with key figures as the war unfolds.
The film features a voice-over narration that describes the events depicted as plausible occurrences during and after a nuclear war. The narrator seeks to convince the viewing audience that the civil defence policies of 1965 have not realistically prepared the public for such events, particularly suggesting that the policies neglected the possibility of panic buying that would occur for building materials to construct improvised fallout shelters.
The public are generally depicted as lacking all understanding of nuclear matters with the exception of a character with a double-barrelled shotgun who successfully implemented the contemporary civil defence advice, and heavily sandbagged his home. The film does not focus on individual experiences, but rather the collective British population, who rely on government preparations and are not fully convinced of the dangers of nuclear war until the final hours before the attack.
The film often invokes historical mass casualty situations in relation to its portrayal of a post-attack situation; for example, the collection of wedding rings from dead bodies to aid their later identification is explicitly linked to a similar practice seen after the 1945 bombing of Dresden, while the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are regularly cited when discussing the physical and mental decline of survivors.
Of his intent, Watkins said:
To this end, the docudrama employs juxtaposition by, for example, quickly cutting from the scenes of horror after an immediate escalation from military to city nuclear attacks to a snippet of a recording of a calm lecture by a person resembling Herman Kahn, a renowned RAND strategist, hypothesising that a third world war would not necessarily escalate to a stage involving "the ultimate destruction of cities" and, indeed, that stopping the conflict before then would give the belligerents around ten years of post-war recovery in which to prepare for the next five world wars. The effect of this juxtaposition is to make the speaker appear out of touch with the "reality" of rapid escalation and of the likelihood of cities being utterly destroyed as depicted immediately before his contribution. Similarly, the film briefly cuts away from the destruction inflicted on Canterbury to show a textual statement by two bishops from the Vatican's ecumenical council who argue that the faithful "should learn to live with, though need not love, the nuclear bomb, provided that it is 'clean' and of a good family", before then cutting back to Canterbury's fate, while a spoken statement by an Anglican bishop about his continued belief in "a system of necessary law and order [and] in the war of the just" is immediately followed by a scene of a family burning to death in their car during the Rochester firestorm.
The film was shot in the Kent towns of Tonbridge, Gravesend, Chatham and Dover. The cast was almost entirely made up of amateur and non-actors, as was Watkins' preference, casting having taken place via a series of public meetings several months earlier; over 350 actors would ultimately take part in the production. Much of the filming of the post-strike devastation was shot at the Grand Shaft Barracks, Dover. The narration was provided by Peter Graham with Michael Aspel reading the quotations from source material.
The War Game itself finally saw television broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC2 on 31 July 1985, as part of a special season of programming entitled After the Bomb (which had been Watkins's original working title for The War Game). After the Bomb commemorated the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The broadcast was preceded by an introduction from Ludovic Kennedy.
On 27 August 1968, nearly 250 people at a peace rally in the Edwin Lewis Quadrangle in Philadelphia, attended the screening of the film sponsored by the Pennsylvania Coalition. Like the United Kingdom, the film was also banned from National Educational Television in the United States due to its theme.
The film holds a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 93% based on 14 reviews, with an average score of 8.46/10.
Roger Ebert gave the film a perfect score, calling it "[o]ne of the most skillful documentary films ever made." He praised the "remarkable authenticity" of the firestorm sequence and describes its portrayal of bombing's aftermath as "certainly the most horrifying ever put on film (although, to be sure, greater suffering has taken place in real life, and is taking place today)." "They should string up bedsheets between the trees and show "The War Game" in every public park" he concludes, "It should be shown on television, perhaps right after one of those half-witted war series in which none of the stars ever gets killed." David Cornelius of DVD Talk called it "one of the most disturbing, overwhelming, and downright important films ever produced." He writes that the film finds Watkins "at his very best, angry and provocative and desperate to tell the truth, yet not once dipping below anything but sheer greatness from a filmmaking perspective [...] an unquestionable masterpiece of raw journalism, political commentary, and unrestrained terror."
The film won the 1967 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
In a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes drawn up by the British Film Institute in 2000, voted for by industry professionals, The War Game was placed 27th. The War Game was also voted 74th in Channel Four's 100 Greatest Scary Moments.