Lele I have a daughter the same age of Mari Liz (Roxana Zal) and I can't even imagine what I'd do if something bad were to happen to her. The scene where the young girl asks the mother what is making love is one of saddest scene I ever saw. I was 25 when the movie was released and I perfectly knew that my town, like hundred of other Western towns were possible targets. I was born when Cold War was very cold and the fear for WW II was still in the air. And actual bombs were still in our ground. But IMHO in this movie nuclear war is a metaphor. Almost nothing related to the bombing is really seen on the screen, but a blinding light for some seconds. No sound, nothing. This movie is far away from "The Day After": this film is hopeless.There is no after! People die, even if they do it in a gentle way. The subject of the movie is what does people leave after dying. What people lose dying.Anyway I think I had killed myself much earlier, after the death of the little kid: I would not be able to resist as did the protagonist of the film

sddavis63 One of the things that makes "Testament" so interesting is simply the fact that one expects a movie about the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust to be exciting. But "Testament" isn't exciting. Instead it starts out routinely ordinary. We simply meet the Wetherly family. Mom, dad and 3 kids. They have all the love and all the problems of any family. There's nothing extraordinary about them. And they live in the extremely un-extraordinary small town of Hamlin, California. Everything is un-extraordinary until one day the TV goes out. When it finally comes back on, it's carrying news of a massive nuclear attack on large portions of the United States. Aside from a very bright light coming through the front window of their home, nothing much happens in Hamlin - except for the aftermath.There's no one to turn to for help, there's hardly anyone left to be in contact with. The bright light, of course, told us that while Hamlin wasn't destroyed, there must be radiation. Can anything be safely eaten? Can the water be safe to drink? Have the people been hopelessly exposed? We watch, as things slowly begin to fall apart in Hamlin.A lot of this revolves around the children. So many children. Children who had a whole lifetime ahead of them and were busy practicing a school play, when the unimaginable happened. The school play goes ahead, to try to maintain some sense of normalcy, but nothing is normal anymore. People get sick, people begin to die, and there's just no hope. None at all.It's the sense of absolute and utter hopelessness that permeates this movie and that finally makes it both so sombre and so powerful. It's not at all "exciting" in the normal sense of the word, but it's gripping. You can't let it go once it starts. I actually watched this back in 1983 when it was released. Today, it's a bit of a curiosity. But in 1983 the Cold War was still going on, the Soviet Union still existed, and Gorbachev hadn't come to power to bring a sense that, to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, "we can work with him." In the pre-Gorbachev era, the Soviet Union was mighty threatening, and this movie would have at least been unsettling in its believability. Even today, with the Soviet Union long dead, "Testament" has power. (8/10)

TheUnknown837-1 "Testament," a bold and occasionally brilliant film about the consequences of a nuclear attack, really does have the feel and mindset of a memoir. More specifically, a memoir written by somebody who might or might not have survived a tragic event they never fully understood. One of the movie's surefire touches of genius lies in the fact that its narrating protagonist, a commonplace small-town mother very well-played by Jane Alexander, never learns who triggered the nuclear war that wrecks life as she knows it. In spite of what the movie posters would have us believe, we never see the actual attack—only a bright series of flashes near the beginning. Afterwards, we only observe the after-effects: the radiation sickness, the townspeople turned on one another, the cemeteries and backyards filling up with coffins. In many of these moments, "Testament" has some great power.However, as a memoir-mindset, it also suffers from a patchy narrative. If we want to consider it like a memoir, then it was one in which the writer only jotted down their experiences in the barest of detail and only once every few weeks. I am completely appreciative that the makers of the film never spoiled their intentions (they never tell us who is responsible for the attack) but I wanted more of the consequences. I wanted to get to know the protagonist better, I wanted to understand her relationship with her three children, I wanted more of a sense of loneliness when her missing husband never returns home. There are a number of characters who succumb to radiation poisoning (we are told several hundred) but only one death registers an emotional impact. The others certainly attempt to make us feel, but I could not stir any empathy, as I felt I had not come to know these people as human beings.Running down the casualty lists in "Testament" is like scrolling through a list of casualties from a tragic event long before you were born: I certainly felt sorry for what happened to them, but there was no particular level of sympathy from one name to the other. Maybe that says something about me as a human being, but I never really had the impression that I could imagine being in the middle of it myself. In spite of Miss Alexander's wonderful performance, there is not much of a character there. At the end of "Testament," I wanted to know about her struggles and get involved; I wanted to feel heartbroken that she waited so long and so futilely for a loved one to finally return home. Even an attempted suicide scene, something I would expect of a situation like in this movie, could not bring me to care much.To the movie's credit, it is very well-produced. Lynne Littman, the director, has a solid instinct for placing her camera and instructing actors how to move, where to stand, and how to perform. She also has a very subtle, unpretentious style: something absolutely necessary given the movie's intentions. And the cinematography by Steven Poster (artfully drab with a washed-out lens trick) is absolutely lovely to behold. It just goes to show that the camera does not need to be flourished with strobes and bright colors for a scene to be beautiful. And there are some scenes of great power: an opening moment where a father and son have a bike race, an extremely touching scene where a mother and her daughter, both of whom expect to die soon, have an honest and open conversation about sex. And the movie's occasional usage of Super 8 home-video footage is a great touch. The music by James Horner is very good (it has a haunting quality reminiscent of the soundtrack from "Blade Runner") but is not heard nearly enough. There are a number of very fine moments in which some subtle, in-the-background notes would be really appreciative, to bring the whole sequence full circle. That just might be the movie's problem: "Testament" never seems to come all the way around with its intentions. Despite its artistically restrained mindset and no matter how much I would like to have been moved and had my thoughts provoked by it, "Testament" did not register much of an emotional impact for me.

felixoteiza 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.