One of the few documentaries ever to show at Cannes, granted a private screening for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the agitprop activist documentary Countdown to Zero delivers a blast from a collective past when the threat of nuclear annihilation loomed like a gigantic mushroom cloud over the horizon.
Nowadays that threat feels obsolete, something left behind long ago with duck-and-cover drills, double-knit polyester pants suits and Charlie’s Angels posters, existing in the 21st century only as a creaky plot device in action movies. Countdown to Zero flattens that misapprehension to the ground, presenting an all-too-vivid picture of our still insanely nuclear-weaponized world. If that doesn’t sound so appealing, be assured that the filmmakers have sweetened the medicine with incredible access, footage, graphics and visual effects that make the message gripping, even (although one hesitates to use the word) entertaining.
The film begins with footage of Robert Oppenheimer, the director of WWII’s “Manhattan Project,” the brilliant theoretical physicist who let the genie out of the bottle, the eternal bearer of the awful epithet “father of the atomic bomb.” His desolate eyes haunt the film like a specter, bearing witness to his post-war advocacy of nuclear disarmament (which got him the thanks of security clearance stripping and blacklisting).
This gravity is quickly countered by the jubilant celebrations of country after country who thereafter develop nuclear weapon capability for themselves. Crowds cheer, strangers hug, de Gaulle crows, “Our national glory is restored!” Walter Cronkite intones the phrase “membership in the nuclear club,” and it’s a club everyone wants to join. “We will make the bomb even if we have to eat grass,” Pakistani leaders vow, and when they succeed, devout citizens rejoice, “Allah is great!” Sobering and terrifying as it is to see the world map click into the nuclear red country by country, it’s hard to counter with much conviction when Irani president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad argues against western hypocrisy, “Why should only you have it?”
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