Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		2.5
Audio		3.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.0

Threads Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 12, 2018

Four days before Thanksgiving in 1983, some television viewers in the United States may have felt like they had skipped forward a few weeks to discover coal in their virtual Christmas stockings when ABC aired one of the most controversial (and not so coincidentally viewed) made for television movies in the history of the broadcast medium. The Day After sought to portray the effects of a nuclear attack on the heartland of America, and for many it was a completely shattering viewing experience (I remember watching to this day with a female housemate who broke down into near hysterical crying). Kind of oddly, at least given their reputation for tamped down emotions and stiff upper lips and all that, the British did The Day After one “better” (if that’s an appropriate term, given the circumstances) about a year later when BBC 2 aired one of the most controversial (and no so coincidentally viewed) made for television movies in the history of the United Kingdom’s own broadcast history. Threads takes more of a quasi-documentary approach than The Day After’s more dramatized take did, and it’s also notable that Threads “sticks around” for a good long while after nuclear devastation wipes out Sheffield, England, in order to document the perhaps even more horrifying after effects of nuclear carnage for those who survive the initial blasts.

Kind of interestingly given our current fractious relationship with the two nations, it’s Iran and the Soviet Union (now Russia, of course) that spark the outbreak of global annihilation in this piece. Threads actually spends a good long while leading up to the actual outbreak of nuclear hostilities, perhaps in an attempt to “hook” viewers on individual characters, but the very verité ambience of this piece actually ironically creates something of a distance from those very characters, since there’s so much extraneous supposedly “real life” material being woven in as well, including news reports and the like.

The main fictional characters are young lovers Ruth Beckett (Karen Meagher) and Jimmy Kemp (Reece Dinsdale), who discover early in the story that an unplanned pregnancy is going to upend their lives. Various other family members are introduced, but simmering in the background is all sorts of international intrigue as the Soviets and the United States engage in saber rattling and then (not to state the obvious) more than merely that. Threads presents various vignettes, often with text being intercut that defines various contexts.

As understandable as the “personalization” aspect of Barry Hines’ teleplay is, it’s actually in the broader brushstrokes that Threads really develops its ineluctable, gut wrenching power. First of all, just from a stylistic standpoint, director Mick Jackson utilizes montage theory in a really unsettling way at various junctures, intercutting brief views of things like a woman losing control of her bladder, bodies being melted by the nuclear explosion, or corpses being picked over by rats, in a panoply of grotesque imagery that is inescapably disturbing (it's actually a little shocking that the very reserved British allowed some of these moments to air, frankly). But from a pure content perspective, it’s the fact that Threads doesn’t treat the “big bang” (so to speak) as a special effects spectacular finale, and instead spends almost as long after the blast(s) as it does leading up to them. That helps to really viscerally demonstrate the long term after effects of a nuclear war.

Threads is an inherently dark and depressing viewing experience, and it makes several salient points about ultimately pretty useless things like civic defense and preparedness pamphlets. In fact Threads paints a rather bleak image of at least some swaths of Mankind, as looting and pillaging break out even before things have gotten really bad. Things actually go from bad to even worse as the story segues forward several years to reveal that while life has gone on, it may very well no longer be worth living.

Threads Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Threads is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Severin Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.33:1. The back cover of this release states that Threads "has now been fully restored from a 2K scan for the first time ever", without referencing what exactly was scanned. The source element utilized for this transfer has a number of issues, and so those expecting a pristine new accounting of this made for television outing are probably going to be disappointed. There's recurrent damage on display, with quite a few scratches, flecks and pieces of dirt showing up, along with occasional misaligned frames. The entire element looks slightly faded, though some of this is due to the ubiquitous use of stock and/or archival news footage, some of which is ragged looking to begin with. Because of the many different sources within this piece (i.e., "newly filmed" moments with the fictional characters combined with newsreel footage and the like), grain structure is pretty variable as well, sometimes looking finely resolved and at other times approaching noise levels. Perhaps due to these inherently wide variances, compression is a little unstable at times as well, leading to a clumpy yellow appearance (apart and aside from opticals like dissolves, which are admittedly pretty recurrent here). Some of this transfer, especially some of the stationary close-ups, actually look quite good and I'd tend to place them in the 3.0 - 3.5 category, but there is such wide variability on display here in any number of elements we typically address in our reviews that I'm erring on the side of caution lest anyone have any undue expectations as to what they're going to encounter.

Threads Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Threads features a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono mix which doesn't have the huge quality variances seen in the video element, but which never really provides much force, despite at least a couple of major explosions. The track is both narrow and at least somewhat shallow sounding, though typically dialogue emerges unscathed and is well prioritized. There's some very interesting sound design at play in some of the horribly disquieting eruptions of nuclear annihilation, where huge waves of sound are suddenly silenced and several seconds of nothing on the soundtrack follows. It's really viscerally unsettling and very effective.

Threads Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary with Director Mick Jackson is moderated by Film Writer Kier La Janisse and Severin Films' David Gregory.


• Audition for the Apocalypse (1080p; 9:40) is an interview with actress Karen Meagher, who played Ruth Beckett in the film.


• Shooting the Annihilation (1080p; 8:37) is an interview with Director of Photography Andrew Dunn.


• Destruction Designer (1080p; 9:44) is an interview with Production Designer Christopher Robilliard.


• Stephen Thrower on Threads (1080p; 30:13) is for my money the best single supplement on the disc, with some good comments on the film and the zeitgeist of the early eighties which gave birth to it.


• U.S. Trailer (1080p; 2:23)


• Re-release Trailer (1080p; 2:21)

Threads Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Apocalyptic dramas, especially sci-fi spectaculars, are virtually a dime a dozen these days, and so the relatively lo-fi ambience of Threads may not be "shiny" enough (as ironic as that may sound) for some viewers. While the dramatized aspects of this piece are arguably not that effective, the overall impact of the film is quite devastating, and hard to forget. There are some technical issues here that may concern some prospective buyers, but Threads is a really interesting piece, and Severin has assembled some insightful and interesting supplements to accompany the main feature.