Those of us who were alive in the early 1960s will remember the fallout shelter craze and the ever present threat of nuclear war with the Soviets. In the movie, the methodical engineer, Calvin Webber, takes the threat of nuclear war very seriously and secretly constructs an elaborate underground bomb shelter beneath his suburban Los Angeles home. It was built to both withstand a direct hit and enable his family to live comfortably underground for the thirty-five year half life of nuclear fallout. As Kennedy and Khrushchev bring the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the brink of war during the Cuban missile crisis, Calvin decides it is time to head for the shelter with his pregnant wife. This was a good thing, because a short while later an Air Force jet encounters a problem which forces the pilot to eject leaving the jet to crash into the Webber's home and totally destroying it. In the shelter Calvin interprets the sound of the crash to be a nuclear bomb and he and his wife settle into the shelter to wait out the thirty five years needed for the fallout to safely dissipate. Shortly after, Helen gives birth to their son whom they appropriately name 'Adam'.
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Thirty five years later the time lock Calvin set on the door unlocks and Adam is sent up to explore what is left of the world. The expanding city has engulfed their nice suburban subdivision and made it a part of the city's crime ridden inner core giving Adam the sense that his father's fears about the decline of civilization and mutation of the human race following all out nuclear war have been proved true.
Adam's jump from the America of the 1960s to the America of the 1990s is quite humorous. But, unlike other movies that use humor to mock the values and beliefs of the 1950s and early 1960s, there is a poignancy to this humor that leaves the audience thinking that we might have been too hasty in our abandoning of these values. In addition to the value changes, the film also gives people a glimpse of how much our society has changed numerous other ways since the early 1960s.
The review of this Movie prepared by Chuck Nugent
A bomb scare in the 60's forced Calvin and Helen Webber (Walken and Spacek) into their bomb shelter. 35 years later, they need food supplies so they send their son out. Adam (Fraser) has never been outside and his mission is to find food and hopefully a non mutated wife. What he finds is the seductive and sexy Eve (Silverstone) and a huge dose of reality.
The review of this Movie prepared by Alex Emborsky
