Panic In Year Zero!

I've read about this movie for years. I'd not seen it until yesterday. I found a movie that was more involving than I frankly expected.

The story for those who don't know is basic enough. A family on vacation pulls away from their home very early one morning and soon find that the city has been hit by nuclear attack. The father (Ray Milland) quickly sees that swift action and hard choices will save the day and he and his son (Frankie Avalon) find food, fuel, and battle threats of all kinds to get the family into the hills and the relative safety of a cave. There they try to assemble some sort of life, but find threats all around. The family despite the father's best efforts are all damaged by the events of the choices they make challenge their very notions of civilized behavior.

There was an unexpected edge to the movie. I thought it would blithely dither along at the pontification level and mope about the frailties of human beings. It doesn't, but rather puts it characters in exceedingly tough situations and while they do desperate things, at no point do I feel that they make fundamentally wrong choices. The father and son murder two teenagers who have raped the sister and given the options, it seemed the only fitting solution. The father constantly chooses his family's needs over the needs of others and while at times his son's advice does cause him to relent, I cannot fault the father for what he does. The clarity of his knowledge about what's to come is probably the most frightening aspect of the movie, and Milland does an excellent job of showing us a man who has to make hard violent choices. Those choices leave a mark on him and his family.

This movie does suffer from its smallish budget. The small cast creates flaws in logic (they keep coming across the same people for instance) and the cave set is pretty classic Hollywood undercutting the sense of reality in much of the rest of the movie. But those are small flaws in a movie that is doing what it can to tell a small story about a gigantic event. There are no hordes of mutants roaming the countryside, there are no big special effects showing the deaths of millions, but what is missing does reinforce the sense of isolation the characters feel.

Apparently this movie is based on some stories called "Lot" and "Lot's Daughter". I've never read these stories, but they seem far darker than the movie. The movie doesn't indicate any source material, so who knows for sure.

This ain't a great movie, but it's a really good movie. And that surprised me.

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