Atomic Cafe

Documentaries are usually put together to teach the public at large something that has either been hidden from them and just exposed, or something brand new that no one knew anything about to begin with. But what we have here is a look back at the dawning of the nuclear era and the immediate years after. At times humorous and at others chilling, the audience is taken on a whirlwind ride through history. After all the years of experience that we've grown with a lot of what is shown becomes terrifying when you realize that the majority of the populace believed the propaganda that was being handed to them.
Through the use of newsreels, military training films and civil defense films the story of the birth of the atomic age is examined and dissected to show how it affected the military and civilian ways of life. One of the first things that you notice watching this film is that there isn't a narrator to guide the you through the information, and that's not a problem, everything that is shown is self explanatory from beginning to end. Some of the visuals that the film makers were using at the time are chilling to see, close up eyewitness footage of the effects of radiation on experimental pigs and the accidental eradiation of a group of islanders in the South Pacific.
Documentaries that talk about issues that are currently being faced take one side or the other in the telling of the story, but when their about the past it's hard not to see the truth after years of education. Sure there are some people out there that would say that the film is still slanted and they only showed the propaganda side of the story. But after all these years, after all that's been learned and seen its horrendous to think that the American public was lied to so severely about the affects of nuclear radiation. This is a very capsulated view of what it was like to live through the beginning of the Cold War, and hopefully we'll never have to see the return of bomb shelters in our back yards.