[Personal Review]Impression of "The Panic in Year Zero" by Hiraku

 Takaya Hiraku

In the very beginning scene start out with picture of car radio tuner with, adventurous music.  The scene after it was father of family smiling holding his fishing rod, the other family member coming back and forth loading stuffs for camping.  Car had big trailer on the back of it.  If I didn’t know that the film was about atomic bomb, I wouldn’t realize that this film was about atomic bomb.  I saw a strong authority of father in this entire mo
vie starting from making decision not to go to camping, when they saw a flash and mushroom crowd in destination of Los Angels. They purchased $190 worth of food on the way of escape, and he (father) still had over $200 in cash.  He had nearly $450 of cash in total just for a camping or fishing trip.  From these facts, I assume that family was upper middle class or even higher, because of average annual income of 60’s were $4,743.  This means slightly less than $400 a month.  The father had good strategies in many scenes starting with the glossary store purchasing only preservative foods, such as canned food, flour, candy bars, while some people are rushing just to run away from fallout not getting ready to survive this survival.  So having father like him in this situation, the rest of the family member must be relieved from anxiety of fallout.

In my opinion, main theme of this movie was not really about atomic bomb, but how to survive in survival, in which a lot of people try to take belonging of others, try to kill each other to live.  So this movie maybe implying about people in crisis situation like that of food, water, financial.  Over all, this movie was fun like Scientific Fiction, seeing instinctive of people in danger, but knowing the fact about nuclear tests, I probably wouldn’t be too excited about watching this movie in 60’s U.S.