Ce téléfilm met en scène les prémices d'une guerre mondiale entre les États-Unis d'Amérique et l'URSS. L’action se passe en 1987. À la suite d'une mission de parachutistes de l'armée rouge envoyée en Alaska pour détruire l'oléoduc trans-Alaska et qui se trouve confrontée à une unité de la garde nationale des États-Unis en manœuvre, la situation dégénère en une guerre nucléaire.
Dr. Charles A. Forbin (Eric Braeden) is the chief designer of a secret government project that has built "Colossus", an advanced supercomputer to control the United States and Allied nuclear weapons systems. Being encased within a mountain, it is impervious to attack, powered by its own nuclear reactor. When Colossus is activated, the President of the United States (Gordon Pinsent) announces its existence, proudly proclaiming it a perfect defense system.
Le film est une adaptation de la pièce écrite par Arrabal en 1958.
À la lisière d'un cratère creusé par l'explosion d'une bombe atomique, une population très variée survit dans un cimetière de voitures. Tous les individus sont recherchés par la police et particulièrement l'un d'eux : Emanou. Au cours d'un concert interdit et très attendu de tous, Emanou sera trahi par l'un des siens.
An atomic rocket is launched on a manned moon mission, but one of the engines malfunctions. The rocket's steering is broken. The pilot disengages the capsule and returns to Earth. The atomic booster, however, continues on, eventually crashing into and exploding in an asteroid belt. The explosion dislodges many asteroids from their orbits. They coalesce into one giant cluster and are heading for earth. As the cluster approaches earth it causes global scale disasters: tidal waves, wind, fire storms and earthquakes. One scientist loses his sanity in the crisis and disables the great computer needed to calculate all the firing data. He is stopped and the data provided. When there seems to be no reasonable hope that humans could eventually avoid the crash, scientists find that the moon will pass in front of the cluster so that the Earth will be shielded from most of it. However, a small part of the cluster is not shielded and goes towards the Earth. At this point, mankind's only hope is to arm every missile on earth with a nuclear warhead and fire them all at the cluster. The nations of the world band together and fire the volley. The cluster is destroyed.
The film opens to a shot of an abandoned office, where the main character (Pierre Jolivet), who is only identified as 'The Man' in the end credits, is having intercourse with a sex doll. The Man is then seen attempting to salvage parts from abandoned vehicles, but returns to his dwelling empty handed, where he works on building a makeshift aircraft. The Man ventures outside the office building he lives in, which is surrounded by a desert wasteland. A group of men are shown surviving in the wasteland. They hold a man, 'The Dwarf' (Maurice Lamy), captive, and force him to retrieve water for them. The Man, who has been observing the survivors, makes his way to their camp, stabs their leader, 'The Captain' (Fritz Wepper) and retrieves a car battery. Survivors pursue The Man, though he is able to escape in his now completed aircraft.
During 1964, in the months following World War III, the conflict has devastated the northern hemisphere, polluting the atmosphere with nuclear fallout, killing all life there. Air currents are slowly carrying the fallout south; the only areas still habitable are in the far reaches of the southern hemisphere.
The story follows several citizens and those they encounter after a nuclear attack on Lawrence, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri. The narrative structure of the film is presented as a before and after scenario with the first half introducing the various characters and their stories. The middle portion of the film shows the nuclear disaster itself, and the latter half details the effects of the fallout on the characters.
A lone man walks through the sweltering streets of a deserted London. The film then goes back several months. Peter Stenning (Judd) was an up-and-coming journalist with the Daily Express but a messy divorce has thrown his life into disarray. His Editor (Christiansen) has begun giving him lousy assignments. He begins drinking too much. (One of his lines is, "Alcoholics of the press, unite!") Stenning's only friend, Bill Maguire (McKern), is a veteran Fleet Street reporter who offers him encouragement and occasionally covers for him by writing his copy.
African-American coal mine inspector Ralph Burton (Harry Belafonte) becomes trapped underground in a cave-in while inspecting a mine in Pennsylvania. He can hear rescuers digging towards him, but after a few days they slow down and then stop completely. Alarmed, he digs his own way out. Reaching the surface, he finds a deserted world. (No bodies are seen at any time in the film.) Some discarded newspapers provide an explanation: one proclaims "UN Retaliates For Use Of Atomic Poison", another that "Millions Flee From Cities! End Of The World". Ralph later plays tapes at a radio station that an unknown nation had used radioactive isotopes as a weapon, yielding a dust cloud that spread globally and was completely lethal for a five-day period.
Far north of the Arctic Circle, a nuclear bomb test, dubbed "Operation Experiment", is conducted. Prophetically, right after the blast, physicist Thomas Nesbitt (Paul Christian) muses, "What the cumulative effects of all these atomic explosions and tests will be, only time will tell." No sooner said, the explosion awakens a 30-foot (10 m) tall, 100-foot (30 m) long carnivorous animal known as Rhedosaurus, thawing it out of the ice where it had been held in suspended animation. Nesbitt is the only witness to the beast's awakening and is later dismissed out-of-hand as being delirious at the time of his "sighting". Despite the skepticism he persists, knowing what he saw.
A married couple gets into an argument while playing Scrabble. Their cat has just chewed through the power cable for their television, so they don't notice that a nuclear war has begun. The husband complains about his wife's habit of shaking her eyes, while she points out he has the bad habit of sawing the furniture from watching the TV show "Sawing for Teens" (the show is interrupted so that the warning can be given). They barely notice that there is panic in the streets. In the end, they reconcile after the husband plays a love song on a concertina. Afterwards, just as they start to open the door, they are vaporized by a nuclear bomb and instantly arrive in Heaven. Still unaware of what has happened, they comment on what a beautiful day it is and return to finish their Scrabble game.
In an Eastern Orthodox church in Pale, Bosnia and Herzegovina, an unidentified man (later revealed to be a Bosnian minister) is murdered after being paged to meet someone outside.(The murderer called him "minister").
Dr. John Mathewson (John Lithgow) discovers a new process for refining plutonium to purities greater than 99.997 percent. The United States government provides him a laboratory located in Ithaca, New York, masked as a medical company. Mathewson moves to Ithaca and meets real estate agent Elizabeth Stephens (Jill Eikenberry) while searching for an apartment. He attempts to win the affections of the single mother by inviting her teenage son Paul (Christopher Collet) to take a tour of the lab.
The film opens on the birthday of Alexander (Erland Josephson), an actor who gave up the stage to work as a journalist, critic, and lecturer on aesthetics. He lives in a beautiful house with his actress wife Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood), stepdaughter Marta (Filippa Franzén), and young son, "Little Man", who is temporarily mute due to a throat operation. Alexander and Little Man plant a tree by the sea-side, when Alexander's friend Otto, a part-time postman, delivers a birthday card to him. When Otto asks, Alexander mentions that his relationship with God is "nonexistent". After Otto leaves, Adelaide and Victor, a medical doctor and a close family friend who performed Little Man's operation, arrive at the scene and offer to take Alexander and Little Man home in Victor's car. However, Alexander prefers to stay behind and talk to his son. In his monologue, Alexander first recounts how he and Adelaide found this lovely house near the sea by accident, and how they fell in love with the house and surroundings, but then enters a bitter tirade against the state of modern man. As Tarkovsky wrote, Alexander is weary of "the pressures of change, the discord in his family, and his instinctive sense of the threat posed by the relentless march of technology"; in fact, he has "grown to hate the emptiness of human speech".
Following the events of Planet of the Apes, time-displaced astronaut Taylor (Charlton Heston) and the mute Nova (Linda Harrison) are riding on horseback through the desert of the Forbidden Zone. Without warning, fire shoots up from the ground and deep chasms open. Confused by the strange phenomenon, Taylor investigates a cliff wall and disappears before Nova's eyes.