he War Game unfolds as would a newsreel report. A voice-over informs the audience in clipped BBC-style diction that it is the United Kingdom's policy to threaten would-be aggressors with total nuclear devastation; the voice-over goes on to state that the U.K. has more probable nuclear strategic targets per acre of land mass than any other country in the world. As the audience watches a messenger deliver documents to a regional commissioner's office, it learns via off-camera news report that China has invaded South Vietnam. In a show of "collective Communist support," Russia and East Germany have closed off Berlin and threaten to invade the American-controlled Western sector of Berlin unless the United States and South Vietnam withdraw their threat to use tactical nukes against the invading Chinese army.
A state of emergency is declared in the United Kingdom. Central governmental power is transferred to 15 regional offices. In accordance with a 1962 Ministry of Housing guideline, evacuations are undertaken that leave behind all able-bodied men over the age of 18 in likely target areas. Compulsory billeting of evacuees is undertaken to shelter 10 million displaced persons. Civil authorities dispense pamphlets on how to protect one's home from nuclear attack and encourage citizens to build shelters out of sandbags.
NATO armored divisions try to reach Berlin, where Russian and East German forces have invaded the Western sector. The NATO forces are outnumbered. The U.S. president authorizes the use of "Honest John" mobile tactical nuclear missiles. Soviet conventional weapons fire slams down near one division's "Honest John," which has a warhead equivalent to one Hiroshima bomb. The "Honest John" is launched against the Soviet troops.
In the United Kingdom, British citizens are about to learn that World War III has begun. ...
Chilling Oscar winner hasn't lost its power
Long before The Blair Witch Project and reality TV, Peter Watkins was subverting media boundaries by using documentary techniques and non-professional actors. The results, particularly for his later science-fiction films, such as Privilege (1967), The Gladiators (1969) and Punishment Park (1971), are nothing less than astonishing. In the case of his Oscar and BAFTA award-winning The War Game, they are nothing less than terrifying.
"Less is more" holds true for The War Game. The "near future" (for 1965) of the film, based as it is on meticulous research on the part of Watkins, is entirely believable. Watkins' use of commentary by experts, "man on the street" interviews and simple graphics creates a non-panoramic view of global catastrophe. That means no cliched mushroom clouds and cross-cuts to familiar stock footage of A-bomb tests, such as hampered The Day After, and it means no flashy effects sequences, like those in Terminator 2, depicting destruction no one could possibly see, as any real POV spectator would already have been vaporized.
Watkins depicts nuclear horror at street level, miles from ground zero. Agonizing footage of a firestorm destroying Rochester in Kent is filmed as if the cameraman were buffeted by gale-force winds and struck by flying debris. The aftereffects of the limited nuclear exchange—social collapse, mass psychological trauma, disease, food riots, disposal of corpses—are sickeningly plausible.
The War Game is shrill at times and dated. Yet in a time when punditry plays an ever-increasing part in people's understanding of policy and there's still uncertainty about the state of the world's arsenals, The War Game, as a think piece, can still move audiences to think. And shudder.
