Dir. Lucy Walker, USA, 2010, 89 mins
Review by Eva Moravetz
Documentary filmmaker, Lucy Walker has dealt with compelling and intriguing topics in her previous works. She followed garbage pickers in Rio De Janeiro (Waste Land), blind Tibetan mountaineers (Blindsight) and Amish youths experimenting during their ‘rumspringa’ (Devil’s Playground), while winning praise and awards at film festivals around the globe. She now adds to her body of work with the most pressing, alarming and hottest issue of all: the ever increasing nuclear threat to humankind posed by the world’s accumulated weapons of mass destruction.
Countdown To Zero premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010 and its UK and Ireland release is scheduled to coincide with Demand Zero Day on 21 June 2011 and to open the Global Zero London summit with a gala screening at BAFTA.
Walker teamed up with a highly productive group; producer Lawrence Bender was also responsible for An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary film about Al Gore’s campaign to highlight the dangers of global warming. The international anti-nuclear organization Global Zero also provided assistance to the filmmakers. One of its members, former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, who appears in the film, was the subject of last year’s feature Fair Game, which dealt with the weapons of mass destruction issue prior to the invasion of Iraq.
The motto of this slick and creative documentary is taken from President John F Kennedy addressing the UN assembly in 1961: ‘Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us…’ The film is structured around these three potential catalysts of nuclear disaster: accident, miscalculation and madness. It argues that since the end of the Cold War the nuclear threat has increased despite the fact that the number of nuclear warheads has diminished to ‘only’ around 23,000.
Walker and her team have managed to unearth a sea of archive footage and to conduct more than a hundred interviews with former world leaders, politicians, experts and scientists (including Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pervez Musharraf and Tony Blair) to build up the debate. Although there are examples of both accidents and miscalculations (a plane carrying two nuclear bombs crashing in South Carolina in 1961 or the American rocket investigating the Northern Lights over Norway mistaken for an attack by the Russians in 1995), the emphasis is on madness. Given the fanaticism and aim of terrorist organisations to acquire or build nuclear bombs and the ease with which nuclear material can be smuggled from country to country, the prospects are chilling indeed.
The film’s cinematography and smooth visual effects help emphasise the enormity of danger: for example, there are aerial views of cities overshadowed by large circles indicating the radius in which everything would be destroyed. The film is also sprinkled with mini-interviews with everyday people in the streets of major cities around the world. These are bystanders or passers-by giggling, smiling or looking downright perplexed by the questions directed at them. Their innocence (and occasional ignorance) about the facts somehow intensifies the menace and one has a feeling of helplessness in the face of the possible perils the nuclear armament poses. What can an ordinary person do?
Some critics have been really harsh towards Walker and Countdown To Zero. They claim that the film does not provide any new information or secret knowledge that a sensible person could not find through the media and that it tries to scare the audience into surrender. Lucy Walker says that the interviewing process was particularly challenging because ‘nobody is going to say anything candid or private about nuclear weapons: it’s the most clandestine, sensitive, confidential subject I can think of.’ In fact she was happy that she could get the basic questions answered and we cannot blame her for that. As for scaring the audience, there is good reason and perhaps a strong need for that. How is one supposed to shake people out of their comfortable apathy and wake them up to reality if not by drastic measures? Reverend Richard Cizik says in the film: ‘We have to change our way of thinking. And if we can’t change our way of thinking, we won’t survive,’ echoing Albert Einstein’s thought that we are drifting towards catastrophe because nobody has changed their modes of thinking. Countdown To Zero is an important film; an important step in the campaign to make the world a safer place.
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