(4 of 5)
Nothing, however, can give it the substance. Under all the furor, spontaneous or manufactured, and the high urgency, real or prefabricated just for the premiere, is the film, a frail vessel indeed to bear the fate of mankind. History and distance have not made Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove any less great or—sadly—less relevant, but even a movie as fine as that would have to struggle to stay above the sort of ideological tide surging around The Day After. No one has yet made the case that Dr. Strangelove has been bested, although there are suggestions, even from Meyer, that it has been beaten out in the high earnestness sweepstakes. Meyer concedes his movie "has a minimum of imagination" but thinks Dr. Strangelove is "distilled through comedy," which presumably means that his own enterprise, being so conspicuously short of humor, serves some loftier social purpose. This type of cultural con is a piece of undiluted show-biz self-protection, and a good thing too. Political immediacy is just about all The Day After has going for it. By any standards other than social, it is a terrible movie.
The film is so aimlessly anecdotal in its opening positions that there is little dramatic connection between the characters. Reality is so quickly and cursorily observed that there seems nothing else to do but bring on the bombs. There are no people here, only targets, stick figures on a Midwestern landscape waiting to be wasted. A kind of predictable character collage revolving erratically around the travails of Robards' nicely realized surgeon, the movie misses dramatic force because it has no center. It does, however, have a centerpiece, a 4-min. sequence representing the atomization of Middle America and, by extension, much of the rest of the world.
People turn where they stand into living X rays just before they disintegrate entirely. Fire storms swallow up towns. The images of destruction, mild for a theatrical movie and practically gentle by any factual measure, are still startling by American television standards, and they pack force. Once this montage of immediate death ends, however, The Day After has to get back to its characters, which is to say that it must run on empty. Nuclear annihilation may be the subject, but the film appears to have been the victim of an editorial chain-saw massacre. Whatever the executive reasons for reducing its three-hour running time to just over two may have been, considerations of dramatic coherence cannot have numbered high among them. The female lead (Jobeth Williams) dies offscreen, her passing noted in just a line or two of dialogue. Another major character, a farmer and family man (John Cullum), gets shot by squatters, and his widowed wife and orphaned children react only by turning toward the sound of the gun. Charac ters tumble in and out like cards in a dropped deck.