| Jayne Loader | Director, Editor, Producer |
| Kevin Rafferty | Director, Editor, Producer |
| Pierce Rafferty | Director, Editor, Producer |
| Miklós Rózsa | Score Composer |
Atomic Cafe is a collection of documentary type footage, taken from the 1940s to the 1960s. I say Documentary type footage because the material included in these films is not exactly informing people of how they could reasonably expect to survive a nuclear war, as the films purport to do.
There are some interesting things to take notice of, for instance the view that a heavy shelling of a region is used to soften up a target before the infantry moved in to secure it. This is the reason the military, shortsightedly at the very least, negligently at most, sent young men who had parents and Congressmen into a region which would almost certainly lead to a painful death from illness related to radiation. The radiation sickness might be avoided in the early stages after a blast, but the medical tracking on cancer caused by radiation was not yet as advanced as it is today. The majority of deaths from the bombs in Japan had been from heat and blast, and other injuries due to radiation sickness and injury. It would be some 20 years before medical science would begin connecting radiation to cancer. By August 9, 1965, atmospheric testing of nuclear bombs had been banned by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
The creators of this film firmly believe the adage that; it is better to laugh than to cry. They do a great job of collecting the most important pieces of historical footage of Atomic Bomb detonations and presents it with a an eye on revealing how ridiculous the government's advice was for it's own people and how ridiculous the public response was because of it. It is a thoroughly entertaining film but hard to classify. I have very mixed feelings when watching the film because my own father was on one of the ships that were sent by the Navy to assist in atomic bomb tests in the 1950's. The radiation he received eventually caused his death several decades later. So I don't take this subject matter lightly, but I believe the handling of it in this film is absolutely ingenious.
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Posted April 19, 2009
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Overview