Miracle Mile

This movie is bad in every respect. The direction is bush-league, after-school-special quality. The acting is bad. Mare Winningham sleeps through this dog, as I did. Anthony Edwards did an OK job of acting, but he seems to be as disinterested as I was in this movie. The special effects are third rate. The plot idea isn't as developed as it could be. Anthony Edwards needs to rush to the "ER" and have this movie surgically removed from his resume.

It's amazing to see the rating this movie has or to read some of the other reviews here claiming this film was brilliant, realistic, etc. I don't understand how someone can give it more than 3 stars. The plot is simple: One afternoon a guy next door meets the love of his life, at night he loses a date with her and accidentally he receives a call in a pay phone saying that a nuclear attack is going to happen in about one hour. He panics and goes desperately doing stupid things to find his girl and save her and himself. OK. The panic in this movie was well depicted but there were MANY implausible things that made me laugh... Just from the start what would a normal person do with that phone call? Anybody would just hang up the phone and continue his/her life. A normal person would go after someone that met just a few hours ago while the world is going to end? These are just examples but the movie was full of things like that, one by the other. The decisions these characters took were far away to be realistic. The movie was not boring at all, it is quite suspenseful but the characters behavior and the acting was pathetic. The only redeeming feature of this film was the music and the atmosphere. You will also smile when you see some of The Terminator supporting actors appearing here. This film would have been great as a comedy, but it was sold as a drama about nukes. If you want to get some fun rent it. I think you will enjoy it if you set you up for a comedy/hilarious film. Now if you want to watch a realistic and chilling nukes movie go for The Day After, Threads or Testament.

SPOILERS. What a disappointment. After hearing much about this blink-and-you-missed it 80s apocalyptic love-story thriller, I finally managed to track down a battered old VHS copy, but my feeling now was I needn't have made the effort; it's been hard to find for a reason. Anthony Edwards gives a credible performance in an otherwise ridiculous film. The director seemed intent on delivering the antithesis of the fluffy neon 80s teen fare but in the process blew up his own film by throwing logic and plot out of the window. It starts well enough and the middle section of the film is quite exciting, especially as the time begins to tick away and Harry is hampered at every corner from achieving what he sets out to do. Sadly it never progresses from there, as the constant set-backs just get annoying in their obvious contrivance and the film descends into ludicrousness. Ultimately this is a seriously bleak film, especially as the "point" of this is the eternal nature of love, even one hour with your true love is better than nothing etc etc etc. This entirely fails to pay off as the script for the lovers is risible (they won't be diamonds, they'll be soup) and Mare Winningham is not up to the task of proving to us that she genuinely loves this man in the closing moments, rather that she is scared out of her mind (who wouldn't be) and will say anything. No one apart from Edwards gets to advance their character anyway, so Winningham is just dragged through the streets at 4am in a daze. A better tagline for the film would have been "If you had one hour left to live, would you waste it like Harry and Julie?". I can't help thinking what a fascinating film this could have been if Harry had started all the panic and bloodshed only to discover he'd been wrong all along - that would have been a far more interesting ending to the one we're presented with. I found myself praying for a "it was only a dream" sequence at the end, and I deeply loathe those, so that only goes to show how little I appreciated this film. Avoid this like fallout.

In the late 80s, I, along with a couple of like-minded friends, would frequent all night horror film festivals. Over a period of a couple of years, we saw movies featuring psychos, monsters, serial killers, zombies, cannibals, and aliens, and witnessed all manner of unspeakable ways to die, but, for me, perhaps one of the most horrifying films was Miracle Mile. It featured no toothy critters or undead ghouls and there were no lunatics brandishing power tools, but it managed to scare the hell out of me. Starring a young Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham, and directed by the virtually unknown Steve De Jarnatt, this taut thriller is suspenseful, action packed, romantic, and heart-breaking. If you thought that Shakespeare was the last word in tragedy, then think again! Edwards plays 30 year old Harry Washello, a trombone player who finally meets the girl of his dreams, waitress Julie Peters (Winningham). Harry arranges to meet Julie at the end of her late night shift at a roadside diner, but misses the date after his alarm fails to go off. Arriving three hours late, he calls Julie (who has long gone home) to apologise; then, as he is standing outside the diner buying a paper, the phone in the nearby booth begins to ring. Harry answers the call. The frantic voice of a man reveals that World War 3 is imminent; nuclear missiles are on their way. At first Harry thinks it is a prank, but he eventually becomes convinced that it is indeed a genuine call, intended as a warning to the caller's father, but thanks to an incorrectly dialled number, now a cause of panic for poor Harry. With only an hour to go, can he find Julie and escape to safety, or will they both die in an atomic blast? As the movie's protagonist frantically attempts to locate his new love, we are introduced to several other characters who all become inextricably involved in his plight. With the clock ticking, the tension is wound to breaking point, as all manner of obstacles get in his way. And all the while, De Jarnatt toys with his audience, never quite letting on whether Armageddon is genuinely on its way, or whether Harry has got matters slightly confused. Until the end, that is. The shocking, depressing, totally downbeat end. Wonderfully inventive, well acted, brilliantly directed, with a great score by Tangerine Dream, Miracle Mile is a fine example of how to create a masterpiece on a low budget.

After years of reading reviews in books and online about how good Miracle Mile was, I finally got the chance to see it tonight on tv. As someone who was seriously moved by other films dealing with impending nuclear doom scenarios such as Testament, The Day After and Threads, I was really looking forward to seeing this. Imagine my disappointment then to sit down and watch a film with a great premise totally ruined by illogical plot development, ludicrous dialogue and characters who I never got to care about. What is it with modern day moviegoers who would accept such laughable execution of an appalling script? Is it any wonder the writer/director's CV looks painfully thin since this film? Garbage of the lowest order - one out of ten - and that's only cos this trash lasted less than 90 mins.

A story that begins like a romantic comedy and goes somewhere else. A disjointed plot, producing emotional confusion in those simple souls who go to the movies to have a piece of candy handed to them. It took courage to do this, and the result is an artistic success of the highest calibre. The box-office story was probably not so good, but shame on those critics who helped send this movie to oblivion. Someday the Internet or something is going to bring back those few movies that stirred our emotions instead of putting them to sleep. There is no personified villain here. Time is the enemy, and The Bomb. How does it make you feel to be tricked? Maybe you deserve it. After all those countless, harmless, villains who've walked across your screen to fall like rags, here's a movie to shake you up instead. Oh never mind, just go back to sleep.

I first saw this movie on video around the time it was produced. I immediately liked it even though it was a bit bleak. But the late 80's were full of apocalyptic nuclear holocaust movies and this was the only one that stayed with me. Now, years later, I've just rewatched it (this time on DVD) and I still think it's a very good -- but not great -- movie. Admittedly, there's some over-the-top 80's haircuts and costumes, stuff that would be seriously 'retro' nowadays. And the acting, particularly in the beginning, is 'obvious' and a bit tiring. But when the hero receives that fateful phone call, it all changes. Suddenly, it's like watching a stage-performance of a play, a pressure-cooker where everyone suspects everyone else and no one knows what's really going on. In fact, one of the best parts of the screenplay is that we, the audience, also don't really know what to believe (until the very end). We watch the hero struggle with what to tell people who's help he needs: if he tells them the awful truth, they may not believe/help him; if he tells them a more believable lie, is he denying them the chance to survive or at least to die with their loved ones. Either way, both he and the people he meets turn to progressively more and more extreme behavior -- people die! . . . and what if it all turns-out to have been a hoax? In all, I think this movie ranks as a great sci-fi film, and in the truest sense of the genre: What If. It's not about aliens or galactic empires or anything else that's more fantasy than reality. Instead, it's a situation that any of us could easily imagine and I think this is why it stayed with me all these years, why it now forms a part of the framework for my imagination whenever I find myself catastrophizing about terrorism or natural disaster, anything that could separate me from the ones I love. What would I do?

Miracle Mile is one of my favourite films -I know it has its rough edges but I fell in love the first time I saw it at the University of Portsmouth film society ten years ago. I can't quite understand why though. It belongs to the genre of suspense films called real-time thrillers -Hitchcock's Rope and Nick of Time are other examples. These are films which explore the very nature of film as a time-based medium. Usually the device is used in suspense movies, but has become popular recently in art house cinema like Timecode and Russian Ark. The set-up is simple -after a day when he has fallen in love at first sight, Harry Washello randomly answers a ringing phone at a phone booth. The call is a wrong number from a soldier stationed at a nuclear silo. He is trying to warn his father that a nuclear strike has been launched and the US will be face a retaliatory attack in eighty minutes time. From then on, the action is played out in real time. Unlike the aforementioned examples and the execrable 24, the real time actually works in Miracle Mile. If you sit through it with a stop watch, it only ever drifts out by a few seconds. The real time is essential to holding suspense and sympathy with the characters. Was the phone call for real? We don't know until an unforgettable moment, when the film becomes a race for survival. There are some great, truly profound images -such as the dying Wilson scrambling up the down escalator with the body of his sister, or Harry and Julie lost in a department store surrounded by ticking clocks. This attention to detail and the bizarrely dark tone of the film elevate it to cult status. It has a soul and an individuality all of its own -can you imagine an episode of 24 ever being scored by Tangerine Dream? This is a film about chance -the chance of Harry falling in love that day, the chance of him picking up the phone. The chance that effects us all and how we are at the mercy of it. But ultimately it is a very dark love story and perhaps that's why I like it so very much.

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