Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1985 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
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We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1985 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1984 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s March 15, 1985, and we’re off to see Defcon 4.
Defcon 4
If you’re going to make a movie about the end of the world due to nuclear war, perhaps you should at least get the terminology correct?
The movie starts out on three astronauts in a top secret U.S. satellite loaded with nuclear missiles. When word comes that a nuclear exchange has begun, they hesitate in their launch. When an unknown program forces them back to Earth, they deploy all but one of their missiles into space, the last one malfunctioning and coming back to the planet with them. Upon arriving, they discover the hellscape one would imagine of a world after a nuclear war, and have to fight to survive against a self-proclaimed leader who was in a private school up until the time the war broke out. The ultimate goal is to sail away to one of the last remaining safe zones.
The defense readiness condition – DEFCON – goes from 1 to 5, with 5 meaning there is little to no threat, and 1 meaning nuclear war is about to break out. In other words, a movie about nuclear war has a title that means everything is fairly peaceful. The title of the film is utter nonsense and pretty much sets the tone for no one knew what they were doing in this movie.
The movie is harmless, and is actually entertaining at one or two points, but I just couldn’t get past the title. WarGames, one of the best known movies of just a few years before, focused heavily on the country’s DEFCON status, did this film think no one was going to know the title was wrong from the jump?
1985 Movie Reviews will return on March 22, 2025, with Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend, Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning, The Last Dragon, and Porky’s Revenge.
