Appel d'urgence

The thing that makes this movie particularly effective is that it feels just like a dream. I've had nuclear holocaust dreams all my life, and when I watched this movie I felt like I was dreaming. I really connected emotionally with the main character. He's a nerd who has suddenly met the girl of his dreams, a nerdy, cute girl with glasses and a sweet demeanor, and at that precise moment the world appears as if it is going to come to an end! And he's not going to get a chance to even kiss her before the world goes poof! hey, it's bad enough to die, but to die with an unfulfilled love is truly nightmarish!

The movie is not exactly illogical, but follows a sort of dream logic, where things just get worse and worse, relentlessly, and the harder you try to run away, the slower you move. The ending is devastating, horrifying and heart warming all at the same time.

After seeing this movie for the first time I shivered for hours, and couldn't bring myself to watch it again for 12 years! Its not that I didn't like it, I just knew that if I saw it again I would lose that special thrilling fear that it instilled in me. But it was so powerful that when i did see it 12 years later I remembered every plot, every character and event. On one viewing it imprinted itself on my brain, which movies hardly ever do.

See it! And see it late at night in a dark room!

cb

Hello there,

You're definitely interested in this movie if you've got this far on the IMDB...

If you're, like me, a child of the 80's (teenager in the 80's) who saw this movie in the cinema's with that great soundtrack from "Tangerin Dream" in it(in the middle of the cold war),than you really are going to like this movie... I was able to track down this movie on PAL VHS-Tape on Ebay(you can buy it on DVD now,zone 1 only) and saw it last night on my own again. Ok,I'll have to admit that it's dated now (look at the clothes...)but that same sad feeling that creeps slowly into your head while watching this movie is still there! I really hope with the whole of my heart that we never,and I say NEVER,have to witness the day that our chosen leaders make the same stupid mistake of launching a nuclear attack on a country like they do in this movie... This is not your typical big budget,special effects loaded action-vehicle about a full-on nuclear strike but a modest little movie about what happens to a small bunch of people that finds out by accident that their country (USA) has launched a nuclear attack against another unspecified country and are getting back what they've started....

If you have your heart at the right place,then this movie grabs you by the throat and won't let go...

On the other handiIf you ONLY like comedy's and big budget action movies(which I also like very much)then you're probably going to despise this one...

Go now and find this little gem of a movie,I know you want to...

Cheers,

Dirk

A story that begins like a romantic comedy and goes somewhere else. A disjointed plot, producing emotional confusion in those simple souls who go to the movies to have a piece of candy handed to them. It took courage to do this, and the result is an artistic success of the highest calibre.

The box-office story was probably not so good, but shame on those critics who helped send this movie to oblivion. Someday the Internet or something is going to bring back those few movies that stirred our emotions instead of putting them to sleep. There is no personified villain here. Time is the enemy, and The Bomb. How does it make you feel to be tricked? Maybe you deserve it. After all those countless, harmless, villains who've walked across your screen to fall like rags, here's a movie to shake you up instead. Oh never mind, just go back to sleep.

This is a find I will treasure, all the more because it's flawed. It has a plain TV-look and seems pretty straightforward, nothing that will pass muster for Criterion certainly, but if we learn to detach ourselves from aesthetic preoccupation and focus on meaning, we'll find it in the most inconpicuous of places. Such as here.

Imagine a fairy-tale fantasy about a man, who having stood up the one-in-a-million' girlfriend he just met, imagines a scenario of apocalyptic destruction that will permit him to redeem himself in her eyes and become the savior. When he rushes into her apartment to pick her up she is sleeping, a sleeping beauty and he the prince charming.

Now imagine this planted inside a world of chaotic synchronicity, the Los Angeles, nuclear-paranoid version of After Hours. Like the Scorsese film, this unfolds as latenight chance encounters - except at the doorstep of the end of the world. Lovely LA streets, empty, beckoning us to travel. Empty architecture, kitsch (the burger joint) or futuristic (the apartment high-rises). Clean looks, but things are delightfully askew. A gun-totting man walks into a gym and yells at a crowd of lycra and spandex that he needs a helicopter pilot (and finds one).

Better yet, consider this. The film starts with TV footage about the creation of life from the Bang onwards. Evident is a plan, a structure that births from nothing intelligent life. The actual story begins with the man finding perfect love, the soulmate that completes into one. This rare moment of attaining perfect balance in life, the rest of the film progressively assaults by showing how entropy and chaos foil the plan. There is no plan. Except it all begins with the man setting in motion the entire story of destruction, karmic or a deeper instinct of destrudo that overpowers the desire to love. Makers of our own fate.

Here the film falters, in the finale. The apocalyptic vision of an entire city in the grip of bloody frenzy is one of the most potent, better than most zombie films about the end of times ever achieved, but it ends the way it does. It's so strong it threatens to swallow everything into its black hole.

Others might like this last part more. Whatever you do, this is a sleeper you can't afford to miss. Criterion will not do the work for you on this one, this you have to seek out.

Stylistically unique examination of a concentrated cross-section of humanity's real-time reaction to the (potential?) prologue to the apocalypse. Swings effortlessly from quirky to grounded, sweet to severe, & hopeful to bleak. #nitrosMovieChallenge.