Box-office bombs: Movies that deal with the nuclear age

Even now, Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” is considered the definitive satire about nuclear annihilation. Then again, not a lot of filmmakers are looking to make a comedy about the end of human civilization owing to nuclear weaponry. The film is biting, and morbid, but also exceedingly funny. Plus, what a cast, led by Peter Sellers in three roles.

Something must have been in the water in 1964 (hopefully not literally, given the circumstances). In terms of serious takes on Cold War anxiety over nuclear fallout, “Fail-Safe” is also considered by many the quintessential film. Henry Fonda stars in Sidney Lumet’s film that has a similar plot to “Dr. Strangelove,” but in the package of a bleak thriller.

The defining movie monster was born out of the Atomic Age. Godzilla’s creation came in the wake of Japan being the target of the one large-scale nuclear strike ever carried out. The first “Godzilla” movie is brimming with anxiety about nuclear holocaust as a result, before giving way to sillier monster movie fare.

Adam West’s Batman famously had an issue with a bomb, but it wasn’t nuclear at least. In Christian Bale’s final film as Batman he wasn’t so lucky. Bane and his League of Shadows cohorts take Gotham City hostage with a nuclear weapon, leaving Batman to recover from injuries to save the day alongside Selina Kyle and whatever generic name they gave Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character.

Nuclear sub movies were effectively a subgenre for a minute there. Among those, “The Hunt for Red October” is the best of the bunch. In the first Jack Ryan film, Alec Baldwin is in the role. A Soviet sub, the Red October, has gone rogue, and the captain purports to want to defect. Ryan has to figure out if this is true or if this is a ruse and the preamble to a nuclear attack.

The only winning move is not to play. In this classic ‘80s thriller (a light thriller, but a thriller nonetheless), Matthew Broderick plays a high school kid who hacks into a computer and sets off to play the game Global Thermonuclear War. What he doesn’t know is that he’s hacked into a military computer run by artificial intelligence, and the A.I. doesn’t know it is just playing a game, which could trigger a real nuclear war.

After the American bombing of Japan, the closest we’ve come to real nuclear warfare was probably the Cuban Missile Crisis. Spoiler alert: The crisis was averted, but it was a scary, well, 13 days. Kevin Costner stars in “Thirteen Days,” a dramatization of the Cuban Missile Crisis which was critically acclaimed, but a flop in theaters.

The James Bond franchise has gone to the nuclear weapon well time and time again. To stand in for all these plot devices, we’ll go with “Goldfinger.” Auric Goldfinger at least got a little creative, planning to irradiate all the gold in Fort Knox with a bomb in order to make his own gold worth more. Now, it’s not a good plan, but it is creative.

Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt has effectively become America’s James Bond, and the Syndicate his S.P.E.C.T.R.E. In “Fallout,” something of a direct sequel to “Rogue Nation” a splinter group from the Syndicate gets their hands on three plutonium cores with the goal to turn them into atomic bombs, and Ethan and his team need to stop them.

The idea of a severe nuclear meltdown was still largely theoretical when “The China Syndrome” hit theaters. It was already a critically-acclaimed movie, and it would eventually get four Oscar nominations. However, the box office potential of “The China Syndrome” got an unexpected major boost when, 12 days after it was released, the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island occurred.

Yes, it’s only the cold open of the film before we get to all the stuff with Mutt and aliens and what have you. However, one of the quintessential moments involving nuclear weapons, for better or worse, of the new millennium occurred in “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” To introduce Indiana Jones to the Atomic Age, Steven Spielberg’s movie begins with Indy accidentally finding himself at a nuclear test site right as a test is about to happen. A fridge happens to be nearby. An infamous cinematic moment was born.

In this adaptation of a Stephen King story, Christopher Walken plays a regular Joe who gains the ability to see into the future. When shaking the hand of a candidate for the U.S. Senate, Walken’s character sees a vision of him calling a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union as President. This leaves Walken to have to decide just how far he can go to try and keep that vision from becoming a reality.

Most of these films have been about the threat of nuclear war. This one is an early example of the fallout of such an event. “On the Beach” deals with the aftermath of nuclear war, where Melbourne, Australia is the only major city not yet destroyed. The film has quite the cast, and it is also directed by Stanley Kramer, a politically-motivated director who was fond of a “message movie.”

Here’s one that is also standing in for the whole series. In the first film, all we find out is that humans destroyed themselves with nuclear weapons (us maniacs), leaving apes to evolve into the most-intelligent species on the planet. Then, in the second film, “Beneath the Planet of the Apes,” we meet the mutated human survivors of that nuclear fallout, who naturally live underground and worship an atomic bomb. At the end of the movie, Charlton Heston’s Taylor detonates the bomb, destroying the planet…and then the series continues for three more (prequel) movies.

Karen Silkwood was a real employee at a plutonium plant who blew the whistle on her employers and then died under mysterious circumstances. “Silkwood” is a biopic of her starring Meryl Streep and directed by Mike Nichols. During the course of the film, Silkwood has a shower that became part of the cultural lexicon. Let’s just say it wasn’t a relaxing shower.

The fourth Superman movie is Christopher Reeve’s final film in the role, and also a heavy-handed anti-nuclear weapons story. Does Superman, at one point, collect all the nuclear weapons and throw them into the Sun? You bet! And yet, “The Quest for Peace” is a boring slog of a film, and a good message doesn’t make up for that.

“Kiss Me Deadly” is an iconic noir that ended up spawning perhaps the most-iconic MacGuffin in movie history. There’s a box. It’s a mysterious box. Everybody wants it, and private eye Mike Hammer just doesn’t want it to end up in the wrong hands. We’re told that it is tied to a project akin to the Manhattan Project, placing it decidedly within the nuclear age. When the box gets opened, well, we won’t spoil it. However films from “Repo Man” to “Pulp Fiction” have paid homage to the mystery box with nuclear ties from “Kiss Me Deadly.”

Japan had “Godzilla,” and America had “Them!” This is more of a straightforward monster movie, with giant ants swarming across the American Southwest. As a scientist says in the film, “When Man entered the Atomic Age, he opened the door to a new world.” As such, “Them!” is effectively a manifestation of the uncertainty nuclear power brought into the world.

“Matinee” is Joe Dante’s homage to films like “Them!” and other films steeped in nuclear anxiety. It’s also a period piece set in the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis. “Matinee” is a fun film, even with all that, focusing on John Goodman as a huckster filmmaker in the vein of William Castle trying to take people’s nuclear fears and purge them through schlocky movies.

It’s a very Christopher Nolan thing to do. Few filmmakers would take their cache and use it to make a big-budget biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man often called the “father of the atomic bomb.” Also, only Nolan would cast Cillian Murphy in said blockbuster, but that’s just what he did. With “Dunkirk,” Nolan showed he could make a gripping, thrilling film that is also steeped in realism and the emotional toll of matters such as war and nuclear weapons. “Oppenheimer” likely wouldn’t have been made without Nolan’s backing, or at least not on this scope and scale.