![]() 407 days into their 21-month tour of duty, the crew of the top-secret American nuclear missile-launching satellite Nemesis learns that a group of Libyan-financed Islamic radicals have hijacked a US Navy transport ship that was carrying eleven BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missiles, each equipped with a 1-megaton nuclear warhead. We start strong, with one of cinema history’s better cost-conscious nuclear holocausts. DEFCON-4/Def-Con 4/Defense Condition 4, Canada’s belated contribution to 70’s and 80’s apocalypse mania, features some surprisingly fresh ideas considering its late date, but it lamentably falls squarely into the category of promising films that completely fizzle after the halfway point. Sure, the post-apocalypse subgenre had a couple more years of life left in it- Steel Dawn didn’t see release until 1987, while Cherry 2000 and World Gone Wild both came out as late as 1988- but when even a Mad Max movie ends on a faintly optimistic note, you can tell that the times are changing. For one thing, it’s awfully hard to keep coming up with new visions of the end of the world for ten solid years, and for another, encouraging changes like the reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascension to the General Secretariat of the Soviet Communist Party that year gave solid new reason for hope that the world as we knew it might survive the 1980’s after all. ![]() The glorious flowering of post-apocalypse movies that began in the mid-1970’s and peaked in the early 80’s had just about burned itself out by 1985. DEFCON-4/Def-Con 4/Defense Condition 4 (1985) **
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