A Fearful Sum Recalculated

“I have become Vishnu, destroyer of worlds.”

--J. Robert Oppenheimer in

“The Day After Trinity”

If, as Dr. Johnson said, the knowledge of one’s imminent death concentrates the mind wonderfully, a nuclear explosion in a film ought to make everything else irrelevant, ought to clear away the cobwebs of mere entertainment and force us to think the unthinkable, to contemplate the possibility of our own demise and what we can do about it.

At least that’s the theory. The reality, however, is rather different. The moviegoing audience, like the public in general, has apparently shown a remarkable resilience, an ability to shrug off bigger and bigger shocks, and make believe they are messages intended for some other species on some other planet. The threat of world extinction isn’t called “the unthinkable” for nothing, and not thinking about it is understandably most people’s posture of choice.

The most recent, and in some ways, the most disturbing nuclear blast ever put on film is the rogue bomb detonated under a Baltimore football stadium by terrorists in “The Sum of All Fears,” the Phil Alden Robinson-directed version of Tom Clancy’s 1991 novel that opened a few weeks ago.

To better understand what’s different about it, what this film accomplished and what that may mean, a look at some cinematic nuclear landmarks is a good place to start.

The ground zero, so to speak, of all atomic films is “The Day After Trinity,” Jon Else’s devastating 1980 documentary about Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project and the creation of the world’s first nuclear device at Los Alamos. Using chilling bomb test footage and extensive interviews with those who were there and did the deed, Else’s film captures both the euphoria of youthful scientists who thought they were saving the world and the horror that replaced those good feelings after the first test weapon was dropped at New Mexico’s Trinity site and the first hostile bomb all but vaporized Hiroshima.

Here were thoughtful, sensitive, cultured men and women who suddenly couldn’t avoid the agonizing realization that without thinking it through, they might have taken the first steps in the world’s ultimate destruction.

If there is a more dramatic, more pivotal moment in 20th century history, it’s hard to think of it.

The movie business was quick to exploit the dramatic potential of this powerful new weapon, even if people perhaps didn’t realize at first quite how powerful it was. As early as 1945 and 1946, according to the American Film Institute catalog, fast-moving B-picture makers made now-forgotten films like “Danger Woman,” “Shadow of Terror” and “First Yank Into Tokyo” that used the A-bomb as a plot device.

Perhaps the first film to capture, as much metaphorically as actually, the bone-chilling horror of a nuclear explosion was 1955’s completely unlikely “Kiss Me Deadly,” directed by Robert Aldrich and very loosely adapted from the Mickey Spillane novel. Starring Ralph Meeker as hard-boiled detective Mike Hammer, “Kiss Me Deadly” involved the search for something he called “the Great Whatsit,” a small suitcase that, opened so much as a crack, emitted an eerie, otherworldly glow.

Yes, it’s a nuclear device, and, in one of the great moments in American film paranoia, it does detonate. Although the notion of an atomic bomb that goes off when a suitcase opens all the way may not have been the most accurate science, few films captured so well the sense of strange, helpless terror about thermonuclear weapons the nation was starting to feel.

Just about a decade later, in 1964, one studio, Columbia Pictures, brought out two very different films that focused on the bomb going off, the lionized “Dr. Strangelove” and the rarely revived “Fail-Safe.”

Archly subtitled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” “Dr. Strangelove’s” brilliant black-humor approach to the apocalypse, complete with Slim Pickens’ Major T.J. “King” Kong riding the bomb like a bucking bronco, turned annihilation and a closing newsreel shot of the blast’s mushroom cloud into a sophisticated entertainment.

“Fail-Safe,” which was shown this year at Cannes as part of a sidebar program on restored films, is quite a different animal. It’s a bleak, thoughtful, quietly terrifying film about the choices an American president (the irreplaceable Henry Fonda) has to make when a mechanical glitch mistakenly sends U.S. bombers on a mission to nuke Moscow and can’t be called back.

With Walter Matthau especially mesmerizing as an unapologetic hawk, it features the kind of examination of serious issues that has become harder and harder to find from Hollywood.

What “Fail-Safe” doesn’t have, for dramatic as well as state-of-the-art reasons, is a realistic picture of what happens when a nuclear device goes off. (The film indicates its atomic catastrophe with a series of still photographs of Manhattan, ending on a chilling freeze frame.) In interviews, “Sum of All Fears” director Robinson says he initially didn’t want to show the blast either. “My first instinct when I first read it,” he told In Focus magazine, “was ‘Ooh, do we have to have the bomb go off?’ ”

But what Robinson came to realize was that special effects technology has so improved from “Fail-Safe’s” day that it is now possible to show a nuclear blast with a degree of realism, including “the shock wave hitting things miles away,” that was never before possible.

Which is one of the reasons the explosion in “The Sum of All Fears” is so unnerving. While earlier films simply used stock footage of real tests, or came up with pale simulations, this film shows us a blast--complete with an ugly mushroom cloud, bewildered casualties and a concussive force that wreaks havoc--that feels shockingly plausible, a nightmare come to all-too-believable life.

Another factor at work here is the way current events have overtaken the film’s scenario. No, we haven’t had an explosion quite like this one, but after Sept. 11 that possibility can’t be confidently relegated to the world of speculative fiction. We watch this too-close-for-comfort blast with a sinking sensation, considering the possibility that what we are witnessing is not entertainment but a Nostradamus-type prophecy of what our future might bring.

According to Ben Affleck, the film’s star, “The Sum of All Fears” is intended to agitate: “As a cautionary tale, the idea is to make it disturbing, to raise awareness about nuclear proliferation.”

At first glance, however, it’s not clear that audiences are taking it that way. For one thing, moviegoers made “Sum” the No. 1 attraction in America its first two weekends, something that doesn’t usually happen to cautionary tales.

For another, no one worth quoting seems to be taking things all that seriously.

Baltimore’s favorite cinematic son, John Waters, told Entertainment Weekly, “I have no problem blowing up Baltimore in a movie if it’s done with joy and style.” The city’s mayor was quoted in the Baltimore Sun as saying, “I think Baltimoreans are always kind of thrilled to see their city make the big screen, even if we are getting nuked.”

But beyond this bravado, maybe something serious is going on. Maybe people are flocking to “Sum” because they are fearful of a devastated future, because they want to look at what might happen to reassure themselves that they can handle it, to measure themselves against the apocalypse and see if they feel strong enough to survive.

And maybe, just maybe, in a world where newspapers are running front-page stories about the horrific possibilities of an India-Pakistan nuclear war that could instantly kill as many as 12 million, people are going to see “The Sum of All Fears” because they want to have a sense of what is at stake in a world where nuclear arms show no sign of going away.

Maybe it’s because they realize that, as one expert in nuclear crisis analysis told USA Today, the average person “doesn’t have a clue what this would mean” and they desperately want to get that clue.

They perhaps want to see something that would educate them in a relatively painless way, that might encourage them to care about the politics of nuclear proliferation and an arms race that never seems to lack for convenient enemies.

At any rate, we can always hope that at least some of this is true. It’s not what today’s audiences are used to taking from films, nor what films are used to providing, but at this moment in time it’s not too much to say that the future of the world may depend on it being so.

Kenneth Turan is The Times’ film critic.