SmugKitZine Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

WasAnnon Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Executscan Expected more

ChicDragon It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

hellholehorror This is scary stuff. The fear of not knowing is very powerful. This is a family story of nuclear war. That is very scary indeed. This is not graphic in its depiction of the end of civilisation. It just shows a few people coping the best that they can. It would be so tough and I hope that no-one ever has to go through it for real.

Jonathan C What happens if, one day, you are watching Sesame Street with your kids and suddenly a news announcer breaks in and says that your country is under nuclear attack. The answer to the question is provided by Testament, an incredibly sad movie about a family in rural California whose town is not hit by the bombs but has to survive after the society around them has been basically destroyed.This movie is understated but potent. We never see any of the explosions, save one bright light right as the family is watching the news broadcast. The dad of the family is off on business in San Francisco, and we wonder what has happened to him when he does not return (although not really). The mom of the family, Carol Weatherly, played masterfully by Jane Alexander, has to find a way to survive with her three kids and one other that she picks up whose parents were away and probably killed in the attack. The town rallies to try to come up with a plan of action, but everyone is stymied by the knowledge that radiation is probably going to kill everyone and there is really no good place to go to. For the most part, people in the movie die a slow and agonizing death.Needless to say, this is not a cheerful popcorn-chewer. It is, however, a rather gripping and moving drama about what surviving a catastrophe might look like, and how people might act when placed in an impossible situation. The struggle is really to retain your humanity in the face of knowing that you are doomed, and, in fact, not just you, but everyone. The movie has sometimes been criticized because the family seems passive--they seem to want to stay in their home and simply wait for a certain demise. I don't think this is a fair criticism; some people from the town try to flee, but it seems sensible to me that there would be others, like the Weatherlys, who would see that any attempt at traveling to safety would face long odds and that trying to live out the rest of their days in their home would be sensible decision.This decision, however, does not save the family from despair, and this perhaps is the saddest part of this extremely sad movie. I am not completely certain that a spark of joyfulness is impossible in this situation, but I am willing to accept that for some people it would be. In that case, Testament is a brilliant nightmare, a reasonably accurate picture of the slow death, physically and spiritually, of a family and a small town.

sylvia-matusikova-nr Nuclear war. U.S.A. as the only one and biggest world's warmonger should have been already corrected, but no.Even today, they threaten with the use of nuclear weapons, the do not have enough of blood, maybe they will never have.They do not know how to live in peace. They lived in war and from for such a long time that they've forgotten how to live in peace.Warmongers like Victoria Nuland, John McCain and others which make money from death should be stopped, not by Russia, but by their own citizens.Not Russia is the threat. "Cold war". No. It is your own greed and your own feeling of superiority

felixoteiza I'm sorry, but most of my rating points will go here for the good intentions as Testament, in my regard, thoroughly fails to convey the intended message when it breaks one basic convention regarding human nature and behavior; that we humans are wired primarily for survival--except for psychotics, deeply depressed individuals, etc. What we see here instead is the opposite; the response of most habitants of Hamlin, when faced to the disaster, starting from that of the protagonist, is nothing short of suicidal; these are the actions of a group of people in which this instinct has been obliterated and whose first reaction in face of the catastrophe is one of complete surrender. In no way they make me evoke the behavior of a group of people in the described situation, but rather that of a group of prisoners in an extermination camp. One would think the town was surrounded by electrified barbed wire and ready--to--shoot guards. One of the most obvious examples of this surrender is given by Costner's Phil, when his wife, De Mornay's Cathy, tells the doc about her baby refusing her milk and the doc just waving his hand, incapable of giving any answer. Costner then gestures her to leave the doc alone. Days, or weeks, later we see him crying and carrying a drawer for the baby's burial. And you ask me to have any sympathy for such an idiot? had I been in his place, at the very moment the doc shows his professional impotence I would have taken her by the arm, taken her out of there; put her in my truck, van; then picked up a couple of guns, ammunition and gotten the hell out of there. I would have fled as far as possible no matter if in the future we have to live in the wild, hunting rabbits and ducks. But I wouldn't have stayed a minute in that damned city! Of course that's what they do later, when is already too late. And what about Carol, who lets the most important decision she'll have to take in her entire life in the hands of a 14-year old, what does he knows about the world? Should I show any sympathy for such simple minded woman, who lets the children at her charge die one by one and whose biggest pride at the end is of always having had at hand the necessary sheets for their burials? (And don't make any mistake about this, the filmmaker herself tells in the Features that she described the role to Alexander as "being all about sheets". Can you say Morbid Death Wish?). The general behavior is even more incredible when, if there's one country in the world crisscrossed all over with highways and doted with gas pumps that's the U.S. of A. (I didn't grow up myself under the threat of nuclear war but under that more immediate of earthquakes and believe me, people know, they prepare for it).And what about the rest of the townspeople, who scoff at and treat like a fool the only man amongst them capable of establishing communications with the outside world? And why in a city where everyone has a car, truck, nobody bothers to go scouting in every possible direction and that for months? Sorry, but this movie is way, way, too unrealistic. Free, normal, people would have never acted that way. It is as basic as this: you live, say in town A. Now, a hundred miles to the West you have a big city and the Pacific. A hundred miles to the North you have a military base. A hundred miles to the East you have an ICBM installation. Then, to the South you have the Mexican frontier. The prevailing winds are most of the time from the West. So, it is as easy as two plus two. People are not dumb, they know all the basics and they are ready to act when the crunch comes. In my imaginary case the obvious thing to do is to fill up your tank and head south as fast as you can. These people here instead, have no clue about what to do (they didn't even know the most likely targets for a nuclear attack in their state!). Instead of escaping danger—which I thought they were doing, fool me, when they were filling up at the gas station—they sit on their arses and try to go on living as if nothing had happened, as if by ignoring the disaster they would make it go away.Maybe I should say here that the acting is decent & the cinematography appropriate but the truth is, I just couldn't concentrate in the viewing, as the unlikely of it all kept popping up its ugly head, time after time. I just couldn't believe that in any modern city in that situation people would be as clueless and as lacking in means as these ones here, that they would behave in such a blind, nonsensical way. I know that the filmmakers were trying to make the point that nuclear war is ugly and that we must try to do everything to prevent, but most of it was lost to me in my complete inability to suspend my disbelief. 2/10.