Threads - Blu-ray (BBC)

As a child in the 1980s, I was subjected to Threads as part of our lessons on nuclear war, and with it being set in my hometown of Sheffield, it hit especially hard. Even decades later, certain scenes were burned into my memory—the image of a mushroom cloud rising over The Moor, or the destruction of the 'egg box' Town Hall extension. I couldn’t bring myself to rewatch it for years due to how deeply unsettling and realistic it felt.Now, experiencing it again on this incredible Blu-ray restoration, I’m reminded why it terrified me so much. The build-up is tense, the attack itself is horrifying, and the aftermath is bleak, brutal, and unforgettable. The use of realistic Sheffield accents adds to the authenticity, and even nearly 40 years later, it remains one of the most powerful British TV dramas ever made.Pros:✅ Incredibly well-made & harrowing – Feels disturbingly real, even today.✅ Brilliant HD restoration – The 2K remaster makes it more immersive than ever.✅ Director-approved widescreen edition – A new way to experience it.✅ Fantastic special features – Includes interviews, documentaries, and commentaries.✅ A true British classic – Should be recognised far more for its impact.Cons:❌ Not an easy watch – This is deeply unsettling, but that’s the point.Final Thoughts:Threads is as haunting today as it was in 1984. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a must-watch. If you have, this Blu-ray edition is the definitive way to revisit it, with stunning restoration and insightful extras. A powerful and essential piece of British television history.Would I recommend it? Absolutely—but prepare to be shaken.

The reviews made by many other viewers are superb and i can't improve on their work. Just a comment that may help potential purchasers to decide if they would like to buy this Blu-Ray format of the masterwork 'Threads' (remastered).* SynopsisThe filming of 'Threads' is a masterly display of making the best of limited funds of £400k at the time. Many members of the general public in and around Sheffield freely took an active part in exploring and developing this movie. As it engages deeply with your thoughts as its very coordinated structure is revealed. There seems to have been two reasons why this movie was made in around Sheffield. The redevelopment of the housing there was ideal for a post-attack set. The council at the time was left-wing. And this was used by Conservative councillors against the left-wing council.Initial impressions on the topics.I.M.H.O the main flow of this story is parallel to a familiar city and yet a strange place. The potential world war trigger -spots is spooky the same as now Iran, as are the motives for war, and protection of Oil interests.Subjective best bits of the film.The order in the destruction caused by the explosion of nuclear weapons is stark. The bright light and heat, the damage caused by an atmospheric pressure wave going out, and returning. The fact that enormous air pressure forces applied by the bomb blast can destroy massive buildings is amazing when you think about it. Then the radioactive fallout. It was handled better in 'The War Game'. But it's still stark. The things one human being can do - using technology - to another human being are shatteringly brutal, as shown.At the time this movie was released to terrestrial TV, the knowledge of huge amounts ( + 500 Million tons ) of dust shot high into the atmosphere, and huge (+ 100 Million tons) of smoke from this nuclear air attack, causing a Nuclear Winter was only freshly discovered as possible. It was one of the first to have the attack, known as causing multiple Firestorms, with the Nuclear Winter aftermath following. The Firestorm was discovered after the bombings of Hamburg, Tokyo, Dresden, Hiroshima and other places. It may have been loosely thought of in the Great Fire of London in 1666. The large area, several square miles, of a city on fire causes the air to rise quickly, sucking more air in and increasing the burning force, hence a heat increase cycle is created. The speed of the wind of this firestorm has been estimated as well - over 100 m.p.h. In the movie, it's shown that glass bottles are melting. When, after the war, the Allies visited these sites, they found glass items melted. This means that temperatures reach at least 2552°F or 1400 °C. This temperature range also makes steel soft and melt under its own weight. The temperature has been described as a super-hot tornado of flame, and uncalculatable air temperatures could cause this to become lethal when breathing it. It's possible, though not proved, that temperatures related to proportional temperatures on the surface of our Sun could have been reached in these tornado firestorms. Such as 5,730°C (10,340°F). There are records of people trapped in these firestorms suffering 100%, third-degree burns, people on fire jumping into boiling river water to put this out, and mothers nursing incinerated infants. Unable to deal with their deaths. Nuclear Winter was an application of the extinction-level event of the dinosaurs by a celestial body hitting what would become Mexico around 65 million years ago. This extinction event is explained in the BBC DVD 'Supervolcano', and puts even this event from nuclear war into the shade. It's 25,000 cubic kilometres of rock and ash into the atmosphere. This is the equilibrium of several billions of tons of material into the atmosphere.I.M.H.O. the initially strong characters become filters through which the failing political and military efforts of avoiding a conflict are spread to the viewer. To me, the film's truly individual strengths come from when it stretches beyond any expedient political reasoning for any nuclear conflict and develops into a display of the unending, brutally grinding consequences of nuclear war upon every individual and the breakdown of civilization. The later parts of the film become fragmentary, devoid of personalities, as the world shown is reduced to a bare statistical analysis of absolute nuclear destruction of what is precious about humanity. There is nowhere the survivors can travel to bring equipment and resources to make repairs anymore. The fact that all the peacetime resources of the N.H.S. could not cope with even a single, small, nuclear bomb. Never mind the multiple likely bombs targeting the U.K.Final Impression.Just another sobering note is the list at the end of this documentary of the high number of contributing Doctors and Professors who provided and supported the technical basis of this documentary. They built the Firestorm and the following Nuclear Winter theory. And this exploration in what a nuclear war would really lead to, and means this cannot be brushed aside lightly with political rhetoric and needs to be remembered for all our futures. It may, as in my case, be a way of re-evaluating the world and your position within it, and show perhaps what really is worth saving about humanity. Even the horrible people.* TechnicalThis edition is on two Blu-ray disks. Disk 1 is the original 4:3 format in remastered form. You can select just the original movie format in remastered form. You can also have the same 4:3 movie with commentary from either Karen Meagher (actress in the movie) or Mick Jackson (director of the movie).Disk 2 is the widescreen edition. And the backup files around the construction of the movie by former cast members. It's interesting for both anoraks and fans. Some of the files are PDF and require a Blu-ray player connected to a computer to view them.The rendering of this movie is 2k from the original 16 mm film stock. And overall the quality improvement is very good. When compared to the original 4:3 edition of Threads DVD. Its a huge improvement. The colours are more vibrant. The contrast is higher. The details in the shots are clearer, especially in the shadows. The neutral colour balance is restored from being too warm as common with older filmstock of this age. The sound is clearer too. The image quality is much better, with some occasional grainy shots. I didn't think that the 16:9 version would be much to celebrate. But it's easier to see, and much better with this restoration conversion version. The team and the software they used did a good job. Another point, there is no need to change the video format on your TV to 4:3 to see this disk. The 4:3 is embedded into the 16:9 screen ratio.* SummaryIt's worth the price to have these two Blu-ray format disks. It's also a great update to this magnificent and landmark movie. I find it hard to understand when some people complain about the '...boring... left wing...' truths of the consequences of initiating a nuclear war, as described in this movie. See the viewer's rating of this movie as 1 star. When so many specialists have contributed to this seminal contemplation and warning of the consequences. It's a public information film in the truest sense.It can be seen in reference to the earlier seminal nuclear war movie also by the BBC, 'the War Game'.

It has become fashionable these days to think that a nuclear conflict, whilst appalling, would likely be a contained event: either a rogue nation/terrorist group with a single weapon strike, a regional conflict, or a strictly battlefield-only exchange. However, it is sobering to remember that it is thought that the USA and Russia each are thought to have over 6,000 such weapons each, with at least 1000 being "strategic" weapons (e.g. ICBMs).Which makes this movie, filmed at the height of the cold war (and arguably its period of greatest danger) still relevant.Combining first-class "kitchen-sink" drama that the BBC is renowned for, with a scientifically and militarily accurately researched plot and screenplay, this movie answers that terrifying question: what would happen to us in an all-out nuclear war.Set in Sheffield, it charts the lives of two families through their ordinary trials and tribulations, and the local government administrators, against the backdrop of increasing US-Soviet tensions in the Middle East. The characters are very well developed and their lives credible. The sense of people almost sleepwalking through the crisis up until the point of no return, is captured well here, making the outbreak of war, and the shocking effect it has on people in general and these families in particular, all the more harrowing.And harrowing it truly is. Unflinching in its portrayal of the immediate effects of the attacks on Sheffield (which, it is made clear, are being echoed in all NATO/Warsaw Pact countries), the full range of human emotion, fear and devastation is shown. But while it is unflinching, it is not fixated in the way some of the more modern horror movies are. The use of flashed images of the carnage wreaked, interlaced with the pictures of panic and destruction are chilling, disturbing and genuinely distressing, rather than played just for the spectacular. This is the stuff of nightmares, but a necessity in a movie dealing with such a horrifying prospect.With such a script, acting and direction, the horror that unfolds is therefore all the more gut-wrenching. The panic also of the local government is also well-depicted, with first the initial confusion, then the panic at the impossibility of the task they have taken on to "keep things running", followed by the gradual despair that there are people (including their own families) for whom they can do nothing, as they are doomed to die.But the movie does not stop their. It charts at first by day, then week-by-week, month-by-month, into many years onward from the war, to chart how things develop. And the gradual descent of our country to medieval population and technology levels. The decay of society is truly harrowing, but again based on solid research. Throughout the movie, occasional spoken narrative, supplemented by text, provide the relevant facts not only about the military and human consequences, but also the political, environmental and economic consequences. The terrible effects of radiation poisoning are shared in brutal, medically-correct detail, but things get even worse with time. Without power, technology becomes useless; with widespread shortages of even the basics, and the brutal realities of a post-conflict scenario (e.g. those in high-fallout areas are doomed to die, so are left for dead) crime skyrockets and social order breaks down, with only pockets of order enforced by brutal marshal law; with a nuclear winter, crops fail and the population declines further.Throughout this we see all but one of our families all fall to the direct and indirect effects of the attack, with only one left to carry on. But her life is a living hell.I saw this when it was first released and it did give me nightmares. Seeing a replay of the attack scene just recently brought me to tears again, after so many years. I suspect few watching this for the first time would be unmoved. For sure, the special effects are not up to modern day CGI standards, but frankly there are only a couple of scenes (mainly the detonations) that suffer from this. No, the real effects - those on the people - are all raw and laid bare and do not need such techniques.Probably the only movie to have come close to this is 2009's "The Road", but even that movie, as chilling and emotionally wrenching as it is, really does not come close to the stark human horror of "Threads".Finally, a word about this edition. To be honest I was not expecting much in terms of picture quality, with the original being standard PAL output. However I was pleasantly surprised: whilst clearly not UHD, the 2K remastering has done much to bring this movie to an acceptable viewing level. Combined with my TV's UHD upscaling, tbe quality was acceptable and allowed me to focus on the movie.In short, a dramatic and documentary masterpiece, and a must-see.