The Hamlin family lives a quiet, quiet life in the small California town of Hamlin. Their weekday was as usual: the father of the family, Tom, called from San Francisco and said that he was returning from work, and his wife Carol, who was sitting at home with the children, was doing her usual business. But all of a sudden, television broadcasts are interrupted by an emergency message: nuclear bombs exploded in New York and on the East Coast. Residents of the town are blinded by a bright flash and from this moment a completely new life begins for people, full of grief, deprivation, death and desperate attempts to survive.
After watching this picture, originally conceived as part of the anthology series American Theatre project of the PBS broadcasting service, legendary critic Roger Ebert gave her as much as 4 stars and wrote that he watched the film twice and each time he cried. Probably, the atmosphere of the Cold War in half with the well-known love of US viewers to the topic of family values played a role in the early 1980s, but the Testament not only did not move, moreover, left a feeling of extreme bewilderment due to the frankly naive script and dry, television manner of directing Lynn Litman, awarded at one time the Oscar for the best documentary short ("Test Our Days").
From the beginning of the film, it is noticeable that the Testament does not pursue the theme of cruelty inherent in post-apocalyptic cinema, which will be demonstrated in the TV drama The Next Day released in the same year, its main goal is to show the tragedy of ordinary people faced with such global events, in which there are no special-effectual explosions, large-scale scenes or any other distinctive features of the theme of nuclear war. But Littman is so far abstracted from the demonstration of fatal events that, in fact, loses the entire atmosphere of global collapse, against which conflicts and dramatic situations should develop. There is almost no sense of the end of the world, and what is demonstrated looks infantile and even primitive – the chaos is represented by sour milk, power outages and a couple of queues for gasoline, almost complete order reigns in the houses, and the characters continue to behave as if nothing had happened, well, except that by the end they become a little unkempt. The main touch, hinting at the fact that the source of trouble of the characters is still a nuclear explosion, is a series of deaths that occur as suddenly as routinely, when people on the screen suddenly begin to die like flies without any manifestations of radiation sickness before.
The effect of “Tani Savicheva”, when a person is so used to the nightmare that the systematic death of loved ones becomes an emotionless conveyor, the picture is also not achieved due to the above reasons, since Littman tries to avoid severe drama and detailed details. Frank melodramatism on the verge of manipulation of the cinema, however, does not disdain - a couple performed by young (and as yet unknown) Kevin Costner and Rebecca DeMorney and a boy with Down syndrome, the son of a local car service worker and part-time ethnic Japanese. But who really can be praised is Jane Alexander, who created a subtle, warm and soulful image of a woman mother, rightly nominated for an Oscar and the only one that looks favorably against the rest of the caste, for the most part, rather faded.
