In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

This movie is virtually unknown in Europe and I can see why. The problem is in incredible naivety about how the nuclear war could look like. Behavior of main characters is not only stupid, it is actually suicidal - as for example in the German movie The Cloud (2006).I'm stunned into disbelief how many Americans do consider this movie to be "realistic" or "better than The Day After or Threads". Actually it is absolutely unreal emotional soap opera written by someone who was not only lazy to get basic information about nuclear warfare, but even didn't bother to get some information from survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.I have expected that Americans as expected participants in the nuclear exchange have been trained in basic survival skills. OK, so there is light from the blast, let's crouch behind the couch! And let's go outside for walks and forming orderly line for bottled water. People dying by radiation poisoning look like they have an influenza. Wow. So let's sit, use our last batteries for playing sad music and be sad in general. What's that? Sort of romantic family movie about dying?Because the nuclear exchange / terrorism still cannot be ruled out, let's sum up what to do in case of nuclear attack that kinda missed your residence. (If you have been hit directly without warning, you will probably evaporate, will be killed by pressure wave, will burn in the fires or suffocate. So any attempt to survive is basically based on assumption you will need to face only secondary effects.) First you need to try to grab as much water from the water duct as immediately possible because this is likely the very last clean source of water. Then you need to hide in the cellar with protection of at last half of the meter of soil or you need to put as much mass of anything between outside and yourselves. You need to stay at least 14 days inside and that means you cannot even bring out the dead or take a leak. The clean water should be used for drinking only, water outside cannot be used, especially rain water. After 14 days you can spent about 1 hour outside for burials, taking waste outside and searching for food. Keep outside activity for bare minimum and avoid physically intensive tasks at that point. If you do not have gas mask, then use the wet cloth as the minimum breathing protection. The cloths used for going outside must be kept isolated near the exit if you cannot wash it.This kinda might help to survive. Never ever go immediately outside even for church or children's play, otherwise you will see the real effects of radiation poisoning that is way way way worse than shown in this soap opera. If you plan to behave as people in this "realistic" movie, please save yourselves from the suffering and use your gun to shorten your suffering.In the end you might survive. Do not expect the remains of your culture to be so nice a clean as in this soap opera, you will end up in pretty messy dark ages. After that you may try to survive the real long term effect as radioactive poisoning of soil, failure of agriculture and general harshness of life. It will be bad but not as bad as this crappy uninformed movie.

Nuclear war. U.S.A. as the only one and biggest world's warmonger should have been already corrected, but no.Even today, they threaten with the use of nuclear weapons, the do not have enough of blood, maybe they will never have.They do not know how to live in peace. They lived in war and from for such a long time that they've forgotten how to live in peace.Warmongers like Victoria Nuland, John McCain and others which make money from death should be stopped, not by Russia, but by their own citizens.Not Russia is the threat. "Cold war". No. It is your own greed and your own feeling of superiority

Carol (Jane Alexander) and Tom Wetherly (William Devane) have three kids Brad, Mary Liz and Scottie (Lukas Haas) living in the quiet suburb of Hamlin near San Francisco. Some of their neighbors are the elderly Abharts with a shortwave radio, Mike (Mako) and his mentally challenged son Hiroshi at the gas station, Cathy (Rebecca De Mornay) and Phil Pitkin (Kevin Costner) with their baby, and preacher Hollis. Then nuclear war breaks out of the blue in the middle of the day. Tom is missing while driving home. They are joined by neighbor kid Larry whose parents are also missing.Director Lynne Littman can't raise this any higher than a well made TV movie level. Jane Alexander keeps this ship upright. She's a soccer mom in a crumbling society. The tension isn't raised very high. There seems to be avenues that isn't explored. Instead of explosions and violence, this movie shows normal life being hollowed out as the world slowly fades away. It's not the most exciting way to go but it is somewhat compelling to see.

I would have to disagree with those who find this movie far more realistic than The Day After in its depiction of the consequences of nuclear war. Testament looks at such a situation at a more deeply personal level than TDA - the emotional horrors it explores are noteworthy. In Testament, nuclear war suddenly breaks out with no warning. I get the impression that this is a family used to watching TV, so there should have been some indication, some lead-up a la Cuban Missle Crisis. While they watch the warning, apparently for the first time, the house is enveloped in a nuclear flash (unlikely timing). Surely there would have been some fires or at least wilted vegetation from this? Everything outside looked quite normal.Clearly Testament was designed with a very different slant to TDA - who wants to watch a remake - but in doing so it over-softens and underemphasises the horror of such. Fortunately the world has not experienced such an event, so we are left with the results of computer simulations. Something like http://tinyurl.com/43mkwyy probably gives a realistic idea though.Darkened skies and a precipitous drop in temperature almost immediately are probable. The way Hamlin is portrayed might be possible in the first few weeks in the southern hemisphere, say Australia, but not in the US. The radiation which kills off the people comes through the vector of dust, and lots of it - "fallout" - but there is no sign of it in Hamlin. Everything looks quite normal. A crisis situation of this nature brings out the best and worst in people - the Hamlin "riots" are mild and transitory. You'd be unlucky to get a window broken. TDA has the missiles and high-tech, a gradual and realistic build-up to the event as well as the aftermath, the almost complete breakdown of civil society in horrific relief, compared to Testament's orderly, if very sad, demise.