War Game

Peter Watkins film The War Game must have really struck a nerve back in the mid 60's. Although it won a Documentary Oscar in the 1966 Academy Awards, it was ironically banned by the BBC after they produced it. Although it may have appeared condemnative of the British government and their preparation against nuclear war, The War Game actually condemns any society in which nuclear threat is a possibility. Probably the scariest part about the movie wasn't that it showed the extreme violence stemming from a nuclear attack in Britain. What made it most unsettling was that those events actually happened. The research was done on previous bomb sights like Hiroshima to provide the information. This element of documentary forces the audience to cope not only with a plausibility of nuclear threat in Britain, but also the grim face of nuclear war. The horror that a nuclear bomb causes is unacceptable along the lines of human decency, but if we are going to live in a world where nuclear warfare is a necessary evil, we may have to keep our ears plugged about the consequences (at least, according to the BBC in 1965.)