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Countdown to Zero
A documentary of nuclear proportions
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An asteroid on a collision course towards Earth is a familiar plot to the disaster movie genre. The lure of these “popcorn movies,” such as Deep Impact or Armageddon, is that it allows us to see iconic structures explode into dust and peek at what a post-apocalyptic world might look like (should we survive) from the safety of a somewhat cushy seat in a movie theater. Disaster movies don’t strike true terror in the hearts of its audiences mainly because they are films of fiction that are based on something that may not happen a million years from now, if they happen at all.
However, a new documentary, Countdown to Zero, is based on a very real terror: nuclear missiles (man made meteors, if you will) that will scare you more than any of end-of-days movie staring Will Smith because nuclear destruction can happen…at any moment.
Director Lucy Walker’s Countdown to Zero breaks down how a nuclear arms deployment could become a viable concern by threading a famous speech made by President John F. Kennedy throughout her film, in which he highlights the three main ways the world could bare witness to a nuclear attack: accidental, miscalculation or madness.
The film, an official selection of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, is a filled with commentary from a who’s who of politics in the past 40 years; Tony Blair, Mikhail Gorbachev and Jimmy Carter are among the political superstars that deliver testimony, along with many other former military officials and scientists, that break down how nuclear arms are assembled, the cost of making them and who possesses them. At this moment, there are a total of 23,000 weapons spread out over nine nations that are capable of being detonated at just about any moment, which makes not pissing other countries off a matter of national security.
Countdown to Zero is from Executive Producer Lawrence Bender, who is responsible for bringing us Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Both documentaries deliver a similar tough-to-swallow message and likewise both have messages that need to be shared. Countdown may as well have been called Yet Another Inconvenient Truth because the nature of this truth is not one of convenience. No one wants to know about the devastation that would result from an atomic bomb’s implosion mainly because there is a “Well, if it happens it happens” attitude. The “countdown” that the film’s title speaks to is a countdown to a world with zero nuclear weapons. It urges the citizens of each nation to pressure their governments to rid themselves of these senseless weapons of mass destruction and demand zero.
It is, to say the least, unsettling to watch a movie about terrorist destruction in a post 9/11 society from a theater in New York City. Perhaps that is what adds an extra level uneasiness to watching the film. It may be a feeling felt uniquely by New Yorkers because we have seen firsthand the kind of destruction and the lack of respect for life that human beings are capable of possessing. But that is certainly the intent of the film: To make us feel uncomfortable by exposing the realism of an atomic threat so that we are compelled to do something about it. Countdown to Zero successfully accomplishes this by bringing to the forefront the realities that only heads of state, presidents and world leaders seem to know.
Full disclosure: You may need to pop a few ambiens after seeing this film in order to sleep at night. But it’s this wake up call mentality that makes Countdown to Zero such an important film and the scariest piece of non-fiction you will ever see.