YMMV / The Day After

• Accidental Aesop: Part of the reason for the death and suffering in the movie is that the authorities never properly prepared for the fallout, both literal and economic, of a nuclear apocalypse. The movie makes a strong case for proper disaster preparation in the event of something as horrific as a nuclear war, though the U.K. film Threads features a government and a town council that, while not completely prepared, at least has taken some precautions in advance of potential nuclear war. Even with those preparations, they're still overwhelmed, and really don't fare that much better. No matter how prepared anyone is, the fallout and supply chain disruptions are just going to be impossible to overcome and lethal.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Is the President just trying to cheer up the survivors? Does he actually believe that the nuclear war was worth it because it was preferable to Soviet oppression? Or is he a callous monster who sees nuclear war as a form of population control and a way to be rid of his opponents in Congress and the senate, thus giving him free rein to do whatever horrible things he wants?
• Americans Hate Tingle: The film got a lot of flak when it was released theatrically in Europe for allegedly downplaying the danger of nuclear war, believe it or not. They were unaware that it was originally intended for television and all the Bowdlerization it had been through.
• Fandom Rivalry: A number of viewers are split over whether The Day After or Threads is the superior film. Fans of The Day After often dismiss Threads as excessively bleak and feel that the Bowdlerization in the US film actually gave enough hope in it to spur a push towards nuclear disarmament, while fans of Threads criticize The Day After as too unrealistic and praise the UK film for its greater research. Then there's a third camp that appreciates both films and views the rivalry as a huge case of Misaimed Fandom, given that the movies were never meant to be compared to one another like that.
• Fridge Horror: If that was a "limited" exchange, what would happen if the U.S. and U.S.S.R. lobbed all their warheads at each other? Of course that is what we are told. We don't really know much about the rest of the world or even the US.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Any announcement concerning countries continuing to seek out nuclear superiority long after the Cold War has ended or making threats toward each other, meaning that even now this film still has a possibility of happening for real. Not to mention the threat of nuclear terrorism (which, while it wouldn't be as bad as what happened in the movie, could still easily claim millions of lives).
  • After the announcement that the US armed forces were on DEF-CON 2, one character remarks that she would only be worried if this was over oil in the middle east. In 1991 the US actually did go to DEF-CON 2 during the start of Desert Storm, only 2 years after this movie took place In-Universe.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The President whose speech is broadcast near the end of the movie was originally intended to be George H. W. Bush (to indicate Ronald Reagan didn't make it to Mount Weather in time), but the producers cast a Reagan impersonator instead. The flak they received by this caused them to edit the film, replacing the Reagan soundalike with a "stereotypical Presidential voice" - a voice that sounds remarkably like that of Joe Biden, elected Vice-President 25 years later and President 37 years later.
• Inferred Holocaust:
  • Aside from the actual holocaust depicted on screen, there's also the fact that most of the country's, and presumably the world's, farmland is now irradiated to the point of total uselessness (as is most of the seed), all of the livestock is dead (say goodbye to meat and dairy products), and many farmers, fishermen, and animal husbandry experts are now dead or dying. Those who survived the original attack will have done so only to die of starvation later.
  • Fortunately, in real life this Fridge Horror inspired the "Doomsday" Seed Vault — a seed vault hidden away in the furthest reaches of Arctic, just a stone's throw from the north pole. Now if we all die from nuclear fallout, our grandchildren might just have a chance.
  • The food situation is briefly touched upon in the film itself. One farmer, providing instructions from the government, tells the surviving farmers that in order to make their farms usable again, they'll need to burn their plants and remove the irradiated topsoil to get to the untouched ground beneath. Jim Dahlberg immediately shoots this idea down, asking just where they plan to put about 3 million cubic feet of dirt per farm while pointing out that once the top soil is removed, it's going to be the dust bowl all over again.
    • The film's writers said that some points in the film are deliberate digs at FEMA: they did try to research what FEMA's disaster response plan to a nuclear attack was, and were horrified to find out that they didn't really have a coherent plan, just a handful of short-sighted suggestions that quickly fell apart under basic analysis. So consider the horrifying reality that the government pamphlet the farmer was reading off, which just bluntly said "scrape off the top six inches of all your topsoil"...was the actual sum-total of FEMA's planned real life response to nuclear war.
• Narm:
  • To audiences from Eastern Europe, specifically citizens of USSR and its vassal states, this movie entered this area quite often, making various scenes — meant to be totally serious — unintentionally funny and grotesque. And it wasn't because those people found anything amusing in horrific deaths of evil, capitalist Americans (they certainly did not). It's because many hardships that characters in the movie are going through, portrayed as a gruelling ordeal brought onto them by nuclear apocalypse, were just daily bread for people living under Soviet rule. The scene where a nurse shares an orange with a doctor and grimly remarks that this might be the last orange in next half of a year is a perfect example — citizens of aforementioned states, who got to eat oranges exactly twice a year only (during Easter and during Christmas — if ships from Cuba arrived on time, that is) without the need for nuclear war, usually reacted to scenes like this one by bursting into (bitter) laughter.
  • Likewise, the part where survivors stand in a long queue to the military truck dispensing supplies to civilians — only for them to run out before most of awaiting people get any — may be hilariously reminiscent of queues in front of stores, which were very common in Eastern Bloc. That's because there just wasn't enough goods for everyone, shops were very often totally empty and you couldn't just walk into one and buy what you wanted, but instead had to stand in one such queue and hope that something useful for you will be left (when a word spread out that there's going to be a fresh delivery to a store, people stood in front of it since early hours — i.e. before sunrise — just to get their place in a queue). Yes, life in "working class paradise" was that crappy.
  • The atomic test Stock Footage of structures being destroyed and trees being blown around during the attack scene loses its impact if you've already seen the footage before. Said footage is so common it was even seen in the documentary The Atomic Cafe a mere year before The Day After aired.
• Nightmare Fuel: It has its own page, and let's just say that it's well earned.
• Retroactive Recognition: At the time of filming, most of the cast were obscure, small-time actors except for Jason Robards and recent Oscar nominee John Lithgow, so as to prevent recognition of famous actors from breaking Willing Suspension of Disbelief. Nearly all of the actors are now famous for their later roles, though, causing the unaware to mistakenly believe that the cast was picked because of their fame.
• Signature Scene: The shots of the people being vaporized during the initial attack.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The nukes don't start flying until about 45 minutes in. There is still a lot of stuff leading up to it, starting with the Russians violating the Warsaw Pact.
• Spiritual Successor: Like its transatlantic counterpart, Threads, it's essentially The War Game updated for the '80s.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: There's absolutely no reason whatsoever to root for any of the characters since they're all fated to die horribly. Which is the point.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The mushroom clouds, made using the same water tank used to make the Mutara Nebula effect in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
• The Woobie: Really, practically every single character in the movie, other than perhaps those lucky enough to get vaporized immediately.

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