Nostradamus predicted that a world war would begin at the river Borysthenes, which is the ancient name for the river Dneiper. The Dnieper is the river which divides the country of Ukraine. This is mentioned in the film in which the Blue Turbaned man will enter Europe to cause destruction.
Demand for this film escalated after the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States due to a prophecy presented in the film. Nostradamus supposedly predicted an attack on New York City by a Muslim fundamentalist.
The Battle of Waterloo is represented by scenes taken from La batalla de Waterloo (1970), in which the narrator / host Orson Welles played King Louis XVIII of France.
Although the movie gets many of its predictions of the future wrong (Ted Kennedy winning the 1984 Presidential election) some are very close, especially the speculation about a massive earthquake in California which the movie predicts will happen in 1988 but in fact happened in 1989. Also the movie predicts that America would be at war with the middle east and that the war would begin early in the 1990s and in fact, at the beginning of the decade the country was in the Persian Gulf War.