Well, you can't exactly blame me and my peers that our history is so self-absorbed and lame. We did the best we could with what we were dealt. And to be honest, what with the ambiguity of modern warfare, I'm more than a little nostalgic for the days when good ol' World War III mumbo-jumbo was enough to get everyone paranoid enough to start building bomb shelters. Yes, we were "scared straight" by Sting's "Russians" and Elton John "Nikita" … sue us for believing that The Bomb was about to lay waste to us all, causing our hair to fall out and making us turn against each other like life had become Dawn of the Dead. As with Caddyshack-esque mullets, we really didn't know better. Like Red Dawn and the other 80s movies that capitalized on the perceived threat of Soviet nuclear force, The Day After is at once good and bad, genuinely harrowing in its depictiion of nuclear destruction befalling Middle America, yet also laughably misguided in its absolute seriousness on the matter. This film was meant to scare us, and did, but it's held up entirely as a period piece, not as something prescient or ahead of its time. The film is at its best brewing nuclear fear out of daily life, showing us Real Americans going about their business—planning weddings, holding down jobs, caring for their families. When the nuclear detonation scene finally happens, it's organic, albeit clearly compiled from stock footage in an almost Ed Wood-ian fashion. As a film, it's hard to take completely seriously. As a dramatic portrayal of the horrors of nuclear war, it still packs quite a punch. More than anything, what The Day After teaches us is something we suspected all along: that Steve Guttenberg will outlast us all.
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