Film Reviews

Countdown To Zero

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• Details: US / 89mins (PG).

As if we didn't have enough to worry about. Remember that thing you used to panic over but then forgot all about? Well, you better start panicking again. A competent and sometimes interesting nuclear threat documentary Countdown To Zero may be, but it's all old hat and it's blatant fear-mongering is irritating. Methinks American Defence will thank Lucy Walker when their inflated budget gets the green light next year.
'There is nothing that makes the launch of nuclear threat impossible,' is just one of the many quotes culled from this documentary. At first glance Countdown To Zero is a balanced, informed treatise on nuclear disarmament. Director Lucy Walker is at pains to show how dangerous it is that Pakistan, Iran and North Korea have nuclear capability, but also shows the incompetency of America and their handling of this planet's biggest threat. One scary sequence shows how many missiles have been 'lost' since WWII: where did they go? No one knows. Walker finishes up with a montage of interviews by people in the street from all over the world: they all wish there were no nuclear weapons. That's nice - the entire world working with one goal: removing this awful threat to our existence - but for eighty-five or so minutes before that there is an underlying message that it's better that 'we' (as in 'the west', as in 'The US of A') have them and no one else does. 'We' are to be trusted, see.
There are startling stories, however, which makes Countdown To Zero watchable. In 1995, the world came this close to a nuclear war when a US missile was launched in Norway. All the Russian interpretations of the launch suggested one thing: America has started WWIII, but Boris Yeltsin, despite extreme pressure from his ministers, went against protocol and didn't retaliate. Good old Boris.Boris doesn't contribute here, obviously, but Walker pulls off a coup with interviews with Tony Blair, Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter, Robert McNamara and Valerie Plame Wilson (subject of the recent Fair Game). The talking heads are mostly connected by the age old footage we've seen a thousand times - a house blown apart in the Arizona desert, a mushroom cloud over an Atoll, etc.
Waste Land director Walker keeps things moving at a brisk pace but Countdown To Zero looks more like a National Geographic documentary than a cinema release.

Review by Gavin Burke