Good concept, poorly executed.

best movie i've ever seen.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Blistering performances.

I will never forget this film. I saw it in a theatre in 1983. I also taught an abbreviated version of the screenplay to my English students. This is about a world without hope and what we do when that happens. I think about "Children of Men" or "Childhood's End" or "On the Beach" and what our human condition is when there is no future. This film with the amazing Jane Alexander has to do with selflessness and sacrifice when there is no endgame. The scene where love and sex are talked about with the dying daughter. The birthday party with the graham crackers and the jam when foodstuffs have dried up. The finding of the Teddy bear and so on. It's horrifying enough when a person knows he or she is going to die, but this is a world. Yet here are are again in 2017, still using the phrase, "if you start something, you will be wiped from the face of the Earth." Let us be diligent and not stupidly think that if it happens somewhere else, it's not going to affect everyone.

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.

I'm sorry, but most of my rating points will go here for the good intentions as Testament, in my regard, thoroughly fails to convey the intended message when it breaks one basic convention regarding human nature and behavior; that we humans are wired primarily for survival--except for psychotics, deeply depressed individuals, etc. What we see here instead is the opposite; the response of most habitants of Hamlin, when faced to the disaster, starting from that of the protagonist, is nothing short of suicidal; these are the actions of a group of people in which this instinct has been obliterated and whose first reaction in face of the catastrophe is one of complete surrender. In no way they make me evoke the behavior of a group of people in the described situation, but rather that of a group of prisoners in an extermination camp. One would think the town was surrounded by electrified barbed wire and ready--to--shoot guards. One of the most obvious examples of this surrender is given by Costner's Phil, when his wife, De Mornay's Cathy, tells the doc about her baby refusing her milk and the doc just waving his hand, incapable of giving any answer. Costner then gestures her to leave the doc alone. Days, or weeks, later we see him crying and carrying a drawer for the baby's burial. And you ask me to have any sympathy for such an idiot? had I been in his place, at the very moment the doc shows his professional impotence I would have taken her by the arm, taken her out of there; put her in my truck, van; then picked up a couple of guns, ammunition and gotten the hell out of there. I would have fled as far as possible no matter if in the future we have to live in the wild, hunting rabbits and ducks. But I wouldn't have stayed a minute in that damned city! Of course that's what they do later, when is already too late. And what about Carol, who lets the most important decision she'll have to take in her entire life in the hands of a 14-year old, what does he knows about the world? Should I show any sympathy for such simple minded woman, who lets the children at her charge die one by one and whose biggest pride at the end is of always having had at hand the necessary sheets for their burials? (And don't make any mistake about this, the filmmaker herself tells in the Features that she described the role to Alexander as "being all about sheets". Can you say Morbid Death Wish?). The general behavior is even more incredible when, if there's one country in the world crisscrossed all over with highways and doted with gas pumps that's the U.S. of A. (I didn't grow up myself under the threat of nuclear war but under that more immediate of earthquakes and believe me, people know, they prepare for it).And what about the rest of the townspeople, who scoff at and treat like a fool the only man amongst them capable of establishing communications with the outside world? And why in a city where everyone has a car, truck, nobody bothers to go scouting in every possible direction and that for months? Sorry, but this movie is way, way, too unrealistic. Free, normal, people would have never acted that way. It is as basic as this: you live, say in town A. Now, a hundred miles to the West you have a big city and the Pacific. A hundred miles to the North you have a military base. A hundred miles to the East you have an ICBM installation. Then, to the South you have the Mexican frontier. The prevailing winds are most of the time from the West. So, it is as easy as two plus two. People are not dumb, they know all the basics and they are ready to act when the crunch comes. In my imaginary case the obvious thing to do is to fill up your tank and head south as fast as you can. These people here instead, have no clue about what to do (they didn't even know the most likely targets for a nuclear attack in their state!). Instead of escaping danger—which I thought they were doing, fool me, when they were filling up at the gas station—they sit on their arses and try to go on living as if nothing had happened, as if by ignoring the disaster they would make it go away.Maybe I should say here that the acting is decent & the cinematography appropriate but the truth is, I just couldn't concentrate in the viewing, as the unlikely of it all kept popping up its ugly head, time after time. I just couldn't believe that in any modern city in that situation people would be as clueless and as lacking in means as these ones here, that they would behave in such a blind, nonsensical way. I know that the filmmakers were trying to make the point that nuclear war is ugly and that we must try to do everything to prevent, but most of it was lost to me in my complete inability to suspend my disbelief. 2/10.

I saw this film in 1983 soon after it came out. The film affected me greatly. (A child of the Cold War era, I had stuffed canned goods into a knapsack during the week of the Cuban Missile Crisis.) After viewing the film, I immediately arranged to borrow a 16mm copy from the local library and to rent a projector to show it. I contacted neighbourhood parents to ask if any of their children would like come and watch the film. Then, one evening, I went to the library, got the film, picked up the projector, collected the children, threaded the projector, and showed the film. I did this because I felt that if only one child was moved by seeing the film to try to prevent the catastrophe it portrayed, it was worth the effort.