Other Sellers on Amazon
96% positive over last 12 months
Image Unavailable
Color:
-
-
-
- Sorry, this item is not available in
- Image not available
- To view this video download Flash Player
Trinity & Beyond - The Atomic Bomb Movie
Special Collector's Edition
Return this item for free
Free returns are available for the shipping address you chose. You can return the item for any reason in new and unused condition: no shipping charges
Learn more about free returns.- Go to your orders and start the return
- Select the return method
- Ship it!
Return this item for free
Free returns are available for the shipping address you chose. You can return the item for any reason in new and unused condition: no shipping charges
Learn more about free returns.- Go to your orders and start the return
- Select the return method
- Ship it!
Return this item for free
Free returns are available for the shipping address you chose. You can return the item for any reason in new and unused condition: no shipping charges
Learn more about free returns.- Go to your orders and start the return
- Select the return method
- Ship it!
Additional DVD options | Edition | Discs | Price | New from | Used from |
DVD
January 18, 2000 "Please retry" | Original Edition | 1 |
—
| — | $5.99 |
Watch Instantly with | Rent | Buy |
Purchase options and add-ons
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may deliver to you quickly
- Atomic Journeys - Welcome to Ground ZeroWilliam ShatnerDVDFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Sunday, Mar 24Only 14 left in stock - order soon.
- The Bomb.DVDFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Sunday, Mar 24Only 8 left in stock - order soon.
- The Neutron BombSamuel T. CohenBlu-rayFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Sunday, Mar 24
- Nukes in Space - The Rainbow BombsWilliam ShatnerDVDFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Sunday, Mar 24Only 13 left in stock (more on the way).
- American Experience: Command & Controln/aDVDFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Sunday, Mar 24Only 17 left in stock - order soon.
- HiroshimaSpottiswoode, RogerDVDFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Sunday, Mar 24
Product Description
Product Description
The Ultimate DVD Experience!... This special 2-disk Wide Screen version of "Trinity and Beyond" contains new, never before seen extras only available on this limited edition. "Trinity and Beyond" is an unsettling yet visually fascinating documentary presenting the history of nuclear weapons development and testing between 1945 until 1963. Narrated by William Shatner and featuring an original score performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, the film reveals unreleased and classified government footage depicting in graphic detail these powerful and awesome weapons. Many scenes were restored with an Academy Award winning process created to make the footage look new. Director/producer Peter Kuran, traveled throughout the U.S. to locate footage that includes bombs being suspended by balloon, exploding under the ocean, being shot from a cannon and detonated in outer space. (c) 1995, 2015 VCEinc. Running Time: 92 minutes Featured on the DVD: This special Wide Screen version was made from the blu-ray transfer.
Review
Trinity and Beyond is a factually solid, visually stunning, informative documentary. --Emanuel Levy, Daily Variety Seeing a cannon fire a bomb in the Nevada desert or a detonation in space is enough to recommend this disturbing but explosively thought-provoking cinematic experience. --David Hunter, Hollywood Reporter --David Hunter, Hollywood Reporter
"Seeing a cannon fire a bomb in the Nevada desert or a detonation in space is enough to recommend this disturbing but explosively thought-provoking cinematic experience." --David Hunter, Hollywood Reporter
About the Director
Visual Concept Entertainment began in 1982 after founder Peter Kuran finished work as animation supervisor for Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) on George Lucas' The Empire Strikes Back. Kuran started his career in 1976 working as an animator on the original Star Wars. As an animator on Star Wars, Kuran introduced the concept of animating shadows and interactive light to objects to make them appear more interactive. Since that time, Peter and VCE have worked on over 250 theatrical motion pictures including both "Addams Family" films and all three "Robocop" features. VCE work was seen in "Men In Black," "Thirteen Days," "A Beautiful Mind," "X-Men 2," and "The Last Samurai." In 2003, Peter won an Academy Award in the Scientific and Technical Achievement category for his RCI Color Restoration Process. As a filmmaker, Peter has produced five documentaries on the subject of Atomic history, weapons and testing. Beginning in 1995, Peter produced and directed the award winning film "Trinity and Beyond (the Atomic Bomb Movie)" and has since produced "Atomic Filmmakers," "Atomic Journeys," "Nukes in Space" and "Nuclear 911." Pete was recently written up in the New York Times for his book "How To Photograph an Atomic Bomb."
Product details
- Is Discontinued By Manufacturer : No
- MPAA rating : NR (Not Rated)
- Product Dimensions : 7.5 x 5.5 x 0.53 inches; 4 ounces
- Director : Peter Kuran
- Media Format : Color, NTSC, Multiple Formats, Widescreen
- Run time : 1 hour and 32 minutes
- Release date : October 24, 2006
- Actors : William Shatner, Edward Teller, W.H.P. Blandy, Frank H. Shelton, Dwight D. Eisenhower
- Studio : Goldhill Home Media
- ASIN : B000GFRI72
- Number of discs : 1
- Best Sellers Rank: #36,901 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
- #503 in Military & War (Movies & TV)
- #753 in Documentary (Movies & TV)
- #782 in Science Fiction DVDs
- Customer Reviews:
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
when you're talking about a weapon that can destroy a city,, and is rated in MEGATONS that is frightening
not only that but this film i revelant today now there are 3 idiots running around the nuclear powder keg with blow torches,and the sobering and frightening thing is this is happening RIGHT NOW north korea ,, china an russia all have leaders that have no concept o a nuclar explosion is,, or the consequenses afterword will be do these fools think that if they fire a missile at a country that that country won't retaliate
with missiles of their own?? once that missile leaves that silo the whole ball of wax is going to snow ball
out of control and every body gets it in the head i promise you that if tis scenariio becomes the real magila this world will become a very different place a much harsher place to survive in
This theme of desensitization is borne out by the interviews with two atomic weaponeers, Frank Shelton and Edward Teller. Shelton is a regular-guy engineer, and seems highly accomplished in his trade. But it's Teller who is truly revealing (and revealed), as he disingenuously claims that he only wanted to "gain knowledge that would deter Stalin" militarily when he sought to build the real doomsday weapon, the hydrogen bomb, in the 1950s. (Teller doesn't get around to explaining that, unlike Hiroshima-type fission weapons that can only be built up to a size of tens of kilotons, which is quite enough to establish a deterrent force, fusion-powered hydrogen bombs can reach unlimited yields--tens to hundreds of megatons--limited only by the weight-carrying capacity of delivery systems.) Teller sounds quite proud when he describes how he pushed Truman very hard to build those things, and he looks and sounds immensely and smugly self-satisfied when he says that Truman "made the right choice" to develop those Strangelovian things.
In the movie, we see H-bomb shots that reach tens of millions of tons of TNT-equivalent yield, the unholy children of Edward Teller and his co-inventor (and even smarter innovator) Stan Ulam. (Teller, by the way, barely credits Ulam as the co-inventor of the H-bomb, right under his breath. Talk about a display of megalomania--Teller doesn't even want to share the credit for inventing the doomsday device that can end civilization.) What we see happening throughout The Atomic Bomb Movie, despite the efforts of the people who were making these weapons to make us believe otherwise, is the normalization of horrific power into a stockpile of devices that these people apparently believed could be used and controlled as if they were nothing more than oversized artillery shells. (We do see an atomic cannon being fired--WOW, would that have ever been fun, I've got to admit!!) They seem to think of them as merely oversized flash bulbs.
They weren't (and aren't) flash bulbs, and the film footage in this movie demonstrates exactly why they simply cannot ever be used in any meaningful sense. After you have seen this film you may be able to begin to understand why only a few dozen of the smallest types, with Hiroshima-Nagasaki types of yields, will always be enough to deter any country from attacking another--and why they are utterly useless as military weapons. Concomitant with that understanding is the realization that the interview claims made by Teller (who eventually talked Reagan into thinking that atomic-bomb-powered Star Wars systems could actually be built and would be effective) are so disingenuous as to amount to lies. This movie clearly demonstrates the futility of pursuing the development of atomic weapons by --any-- country.
This DVD does not tell the story of science run amok; science as an enterprise of the human spirit has practically nothing to do with any of the shots that appear in this film. What could have ever been the "scientific" point of subjecting humans and animals to the ghastly "test shot" effects that we see portrayed in this movie, white-coated field technicians who examine post-shot, dead and dying animals notwithstanding? There's that desensitization thing again.
No, it wasn't for science that this work was done. This movie demonstrates that it was for the sake of hubris, of satisfying a misguided demand for "power" that these shots were fired, and that humans and animals (both the ones near the bombs and the "downwinders" across the United States and around the world) were treated as if they were irrelevant or worse. The situation regarding human subjects becomes simply ludicrous when we see a little old lady from some Podunk Junction hometown, a real-life Ma Kettle, being interviewed while sitting in a slit trench in pre-dawn darkness, awaiting an atomic-test-range bomb blast while wearing her oversized Civil Defense hard hat. OMG. Apparently the US government wanted to get some film footage of her to reassure "regular" people that, in the event of an actual atomic war, we would all just ride out a blast or two and then go on with our lives--an example of desensitization taken to the tenth power. Never mind that by the time that footage was composed, the bomb arsenals of the US and USSR were large enough to obliterate the entire world's civilization several times over, or that, as Winston Churchill said, all the nuclear powers were managing to do was to ensure that they could "make the rubble bounce".
In another example of desensitization, this time with respect to fiscal responsibility, The Atomic Bomb Movie shows how the governments of the US and USSR became accustomed to spending unlimited sums of money to pursue increasingly bizarre and useless engineering feats (namely the building and firing of increasingly larger and increasingly irrelevant bombs) toward no useful end. For some reason, there never was (and apparently still isn't) enough money available in either country to pay for nutrition or health care for people who are poor, but the US and USSR clearly never lacked the money to fund even the weirdest enterprises that people like Teller could devise. This movie documents the firing of hundreds of bombs that each cost hundreds of thousands to millions (and in some cases billions) of dollars apiece. And what have we now got to show for all of that, given that we had a secure deterrent force when we had built the first few hundred Hiroshima-size bombs by about 1950? What have now got to show for all of the money that was spent for the last six decades on developing and building more and more of these things? Just a lot of wasted effort that could have been gone into more productive pursuits, if this movie gives us any indication at all.
This movie confirms the conclusion of President Eisenhower (himself no stranger to war and certainly no softie on defense issues) when he bemoaned the unholy alliance that he saw developing between hubristic military leaders who wanted unlimited power, of American industries that profited handsomely from bomb production and bomb testing (we see, for example, how Western Electric found that early atomic bombs were hand-crafted oddities and then turned A-bomb production into an efficient, mass-production operation employing tens of thousands of assembly-line workers including lots of women who look like our mothers), and of political people who thought they could buy "security" and "credibility" if only they could build a big enough atomic stockpile--which turned out to never be big enough to make us secure at all. We see all of them working together to expend uncountable sums of money on utterly useless and destructive weapons.
The Atomic Bomb Movie's unintentional messages make it a must-see DVD. By looking like pro-atomic propaganda, it (apparently unwittingly) becomes the best anti-atomic piece that you can find. It has a more effective anti-atomic message than any intentionally anti-atomic movie could have ever achieved. I would like to think that the people who made it understood this--and perhaps they did; they're clearly pretty smart cookies. The movie is ably produced and narrated by Messrs. Kuran and Shatner, respectively. The only reason that I have given it four stars instead of five is that I think it substantially underplays the ghastly effects of atomic bombs on humans, animals, and the Earth's environment. But I do understand why it had to be made this way: If the full extent of atomic effects had been documented in this film, it would have probably been essentially unsellable. No thinking, non-desensitized human being would be able to watch that kind of show for more than a few seconds. So as this genre goes, The Atomic Bomb Movie is as good as you're going to get.
When you stop to consider that the Hiroshima was destroyed by a simple 15 kiloton bomb, and both the Russians and we American's detonated many scores of devices vastly more powerful than that, you are amazed that the world is still here, and that we still live. The Russians blew up a 5 megaton device above ground in Siberia, for God's sake! That is the equivalent of 333.333 Hiroshimas.
It is no wonder that so many people in 1960s through 1980s developed cancer. It was understood, as early as the 1950s, that radio active fallout was entering our food supply by binding with the calcium in cow's milk. Of course, there are many active pathways, but this particular one was understood early on. This documentary will scare the hell out of you, and it will make you question the current research that indicates most cancer is a product of virus activity in the human body.
This documentary is presented in a very calm, cool, matter-of-fact fashion. The director and writers do not make firebrand political speeches during the course of this documentary. They just present the sequence of events using archive footage, and a minimum number of interviews with folks like Edward Teller.
While this approach will not please the young (and exceeding stupid) Berkeley political firebrand, this is by far the most effective technique for communicating the dangers of nuclear weapons, weapons development, and nuclear testing. I noticed that several no-nuke Greenies posted reviews that expressed some dismay at the detached nature of the documentary. They should not be dismayed. The tone is the key to this documentaries success. The directors are to be congratulated for this.
Top reviews from other countries
この映像の中には恐怖以外の感覚は存在しないはずなのに
美しさ、破壊のカタルシス、ガジェットに対するフェティシズムと
エロチシズム、以上の感覚に支配されてしまうそんな悲しさがある。