User reviews

The first time I saw this, I initially thought that this was happening, only because I caught it when the movie was already in progress. The characters were believable and the realism was well done. It took a couple of minutes when I figured out that this was a movie; At the time I thought it was odd that only one channel was covering this and the others had their normal programing when I checked the other stations to see if they were covering this.

The more I watched, the more it drew me in. I was fascinated over the realistic quality and it was scary to think this could happen. I remember hearing on the news and in the papers, many people panicked when they saw this movie; They too thought this was happening, despite the disclaimers shown during the commercial breaks.

A few years later one of our local stations had shown this for their daily "One O'clock movie" feature and I made it a point to watch it in it's entirety. Once again, I was fascinated.

On a side note, I heard that they day the local station had shown this, many people once again thinking this was happening and phoned their loved ones living in Charleston SC (where the movie took place), to see if they were okay, despite the disclaimers. Maybe this is the reason why no one has shown this movie for years.

There's a pretty damn interesting chestnut from from 80's-era nuclear nightmare films available on Youtube — 1983's "Special Bulletin." I was surprised I hadn't heard of it. I think most 80's kids remember ABC's "The Day After." That infamous television movie was a cultural touchstone that scared a generation of kids. "Special Bulletin" was produced by NBC the same year, actually preceding "The Day After" by nine months. Instead of a world-ending war with Russia, the feature-length special imagined a single incident of nuclear terrorism in Charleston, South Carolina. (I myself had no idea that Charleston was the strategic military nexus that the movie explains it to be.)

"Special Bulletin" was filmed as a "War of the Worlds"-type narrative, consisting exclusively of faux news coverage, and it's pretty damned good. (It won a handful of Emmys.) It's just as frightening today — or maybe more so, given the increased threat of precisely this kind of terrorism from stateless groups.

The acting is mostly good, the directing successfully captures the feel of live news coverage, and the absence of a musical score further lends the movie a sense of realism. The story has a few surprises for us, too — the plot setup is creative and interesting, and much more thought went in the the teleplay than I would have expected. The film asks some difficult questions about the role of the media in affecting the outcome of high-profile crimes like the one depicted. (Would such questions be more or less relevant in the age of camera-phones, uploaded ISIS executions and Facebook Live? I'm not sure.)

I was also quite impressed with some of "Special Bulletin's" thriller elements. (I'd say more, but I will avoid spoilers.)

One thing that detracts from the format's realism is the fact that some of this movie's actors are easily recognizable from other roles in the 80's (although it's fun spotting them as an 80's movie fan).

Most viewers my age, for example, will recognize Ed Flanders and Lane Smith. The utterly sexy female reporter who arrives on location at Charleston Harbor is Roxanne Hart, who later played Brenda in "Highlander" (1986). (She's still quite beautiful, guys, and she's still making movies.) Most jarring of all, however, is a prominent role played by David Clennon, who any fan of horror- science fiction will recognize as Palmer from John Carpenter's 1982 masterpiece, "The Thing." This is still fun, though — he has that same disarrayed hair. Was it his trademark back in the day?

Though this originally aired (on NBC, if I remember correctly) in 1984, it was prescient in how it depicted news media coverage of a "breaking news" event.

Complete with glitzy (for their time) graphics, concerned anchors, wall-to-wall coverage, talking heads, and gripping live reports, it does not seem dated (except for the hair styles!), even today.

Though it depicts the coverage of a hostage crisis by a fourth broadcast network, this aired a year before the Fox network came into existence. The RBS network's graphics, promotional spots, and anchors are so realistic that the real network that aired the film really didn't have any choice but to continually remind viewers that what they were watching was fiction. And though we're all familiar today with the news networks' saturation coverage of live events, this originally aired only 4 years after the inception of CNN -- before that network was the major force that it is today.

Depicting a gripping series of events, it's as much or more of a commentary on how the news media handles such situations than anything else. The way that the events are presented will seem eerily familiar to anyone in today's world, but remember that terrorism was not a big concern to many people 20 years ago.

The acting and production values combine to make for one of the most powerful films ever produced for television. I highly recommend this film not only for its impact, but for its almost too accurate portrayal of events that are all too easy to imagine in today's world.

There is no doubt in my mind that SB was one of the best tv movies ever made.

It was the first of a series of "nuclear war/nuclear confrontation" movies that aired within about a year of each other, including "The Day After", "Threads", "By Dawn's Early Light", and the sadly now-oft-forgotten "Countdown To Looking Glass".

But where all of those dealt with nuclear war or the onset of it, SB was about domestic terrorism. Ed Flanders, David Clennon, and David Rasche were excellent in their portrayals of the harried anchorman and two of the terrorists he spoke with on the live coverage of the event.

Shot to look like an actual news telecast, NBC freaked when they first saw it and put disclaimers everywhere, but people who tuned in late flooded local stations asking if it was real, though not on a scale that Orson Welles and company had happen when War Of The Worlds was broadcast in the thirties - and that's the difference between television and radio for you...

It's hard to believe that this movie, which won several Emmy awards including best TV Movie or Miniseries that year, was put together by the same team that later produced the intensely annoying "Thirtysomething" (and Clennon was also on that show). But when they do something right, they DO IT RIGHT.

As Leonard Maltin's review book puts it, "Way Above Average".

Now if we can just get them to release it on DVD....

My score: 12 on a scale of 1-10 (yes, that's how much I think of this movie...)

This extraordinary TV movie -- shot on video, to make it resemble a news broadcast -- shows us how network news might cover a group of terrorists holding a city hostage with a nuclear bomb, and in doing so creates extraordinary tension while also getting in subtle and pointed digs at the media.

The movie begins with morning programming at IBC, which is

suddenly interrupted for a you-know-what -- a terrorist group is holding a nuke onboard a tugboat in Charleston Harbor, which they threaten to blow up unless all the nation's nuclear detonators are brought to them so they can be taken to sea and destroyed.

I don't want to give away any of the plot, but suffice it to say that, even with a disclaimer on the screen during the entire running time, folks in Charleston panicked when this film originally aired in the early 1980's. One of the best made-for-TV movies in the history of the medium.

Very ahead-of-its-time story, tremendous commetary on the media and politics among other things. Someone else referred to modern day disaster coverage by the media and disaster response by the federal government, and boy do those both come into play here, amazing for a telefilm made in 1983.

The dialogue was also pretty good, and if you look at some of the films that the writers/producers of this gem went on to make, definitely a lot of material there.

Also some good performances from great actors, which is always a good thing, of course! Why was this never released on video? The original (and excellent) "Brian's Song" came out on DVD, so certainly a TV movie could be doable for DVD.

"Countdown to Looking Glass" is another good one. IMO both of these are tons better than "The Day After" which I found cheesy even then. "Special Bulletin" almost has a surreal quality that is very hard to match.

This is not the best terrorist film ever, but it is certainly watchable. I have been on a nuclear holocaust binge lately and this one is better than average. It is creative, believable, and holds your attention for over an hour. The acting is fairly decent, but at times, it is a bit over the top from both the terrorist side and the media characterizations. Charlotte, US is the target for this film, and is one of the very few films where Charlotte is a primary concern. One does not normally think of Charlotte as being a primary nuclear target. However, the film still works, despite the location of the terrorists. Catch it if you can.

Easily the worst made-for-TV movie of all time.

This film is made to look like an actual event told in real-time via news coverage from a television network, ala "The War of The Worlds" for TV. The only problem is, it is completely unrealistic. Factual errors coupled with awful acting made me turn it off after only a half-hour.

The kicker is the fact that this film was showered with accolades and awards. I am truly amazed with it all.

The goofiest thing to come out of this was when this show was first broadcast at the bottom of the screen the words "a dramatization" flashed at the bottom of the screen in ten minute intervals. Despite this, and the aforementioned acting, people still called their TV stations to ask if this was true.

Groan.

I saw about the last 20 minutes of a rerun at about 3am, without the precautionary warnings used in the original airing, and still remember how believable and intensely effective the movie was. Based on what I saw of it and remember after about 15 years [I probably saw this in the late 80s or very early 90s], very well done. I might even add it to my "to rent" list so I can see the whole thing :-). I even woke my grandfather [I was living in his house at the time] to ask him if we knew anyone in Charleston. Once we worked out that it had only been a movie, he was sympathetically amused. His sister had been taken in by the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, so he apparently readily understood how easy it had been for me to be confused by an apparent newscast with no commercials or warnings.

When I first saw this movie, I thought it was a legitimate news broadcast. This was due to the fact that, on my first viewing, I didn't watch it from the start. The TV station that I first watched it on broke away for commercials, just like a regular TV cable news channel would do. To me, this made it even more convincing. The close attention to detail and accuracy of news journalism format made this movie very powerful and frightening. I highly recommend this movie to Journalism majors and anybody who enjoys strong and powerful drama...

A fascinating and gripping film, I had the pleasure of watching it in 1983 during its premiere on NBC. The concept of showing the film as a series of televised news broadcasts and bulletins was inventive and hearkened back to the days of the War of the Worlds broadcast, giving it something of an edge. Along with the Day After, these two television movies were among the best made in the early 1980s highlighting the dangers of atomic weapons and nuclear war. The comment I hear every so often of this being a bit cheesy is unfair. Given the context of the time, when tensions were still high in the Cold War, it gave perspective of what might happen. The only problem I had, was that the film should have been longer than its originally airing of two hours, spending as much time on what would happen after an atomic explosion as leading up to the event. The best film of this kind since Special Bulletin and Day After, was the recent Dirty War. I can only imagine how this film would be done today, given the expansion of cable news, via 1983 when the networks were the only real source of news.

This film clearly shows that there is a very wide gap between realistic acting and reality. Although the production is clever enough, and well enough done, never for a moment do you feel that you're looking at a real event. The closest the production comes to capturing reality, I feel, is in the crowd scenes at the evacuation centre in Sweetbriar, S.C.

Now, of course, this film was made in 1983, not 1999, so changes in fashion alone will make it impossible for it to pass as real today. But does it look like a tape of actual events, of news events, which occurred in 1983? I don't think so. As I was watching this, a friend commented, after seeing it for perhaps one or two minutes, "Is this a spoof?"

The tension level is all wrong. These people are people pretending to be people experiencing life and death situations. That's different from people who are actually experiencing them, and you can tell. It's perceptible.

I'm ignoring the fact that there is, obviously, no RBS network with affiliates everywhere, and the fact that at least half the cast members are familiar faces.

The filmmakers clearly modelled their production after the famous Welles/Wells "War of the Worlds" radio play. There is the same compressed chronology, with a couple of days elapsing during the course of the programme. There was at least one disclaimer saying that this was only a dramatization. Welles was forced to say the same during his radio broadcast. There was a soap opera ad at the beginning designed to disarm the viewer. Welles had quite a few "normal" musical interludes scattered throughout his broadcast.

Marshall Herskovitz, the screenwriter, seems to be having a joke at the viewer's expense on several occasions. No one refers to the Civil War as "the late unpleasantness with the North". That's the most glaring example, but there are other jarring anomalies. That's not what a Wheeling, W.Va. accent sounds like. Local TV news reporters don't use words like "flabbergasted", except in teleplays written by novices. And so on.

Of course, the biggest giveaway is that the story progresses like a drama. There is constant forward motion. Have you watched CNN news coverage of any actual major event? Where the reporters, and the anchors, and the talking heads, and the experts, all say the exact same things in slightly different words over and over and over again? New information trickles in at a maddeningly slow pace.

Now, I'm an admirer of Ed Zwick and his work in general. Messrs. Zwick and Herskovitz had a great idea, and, especially given the limits of their budget, did a fine job in pulling it off.

But, for my money, the best of the nuclear scare dramas of the 1970's and '80's is still "Threads" from the UK. ("Where Have All the People Gone?" certainly seemed good at the time, but that time was 1974, and that particular TV movie has been hard to see since then.) And, since many people in North America seem not to have heard of it, I will also seize this opportunity to draw attention to the animated (yes!) "When the Wind Blows", also from Britain.

80's TV nuclear destruction fare, entertaining but not especially realistic or accurate. Pretty funny when one of the "terrorist" characters says NBC would kill its Mother to have exclusive coverage of the story (this was originally broadcast on NBC). Side note about the credits on IMDb for this...the John Walsh (John E Walsh) of America's Most Wanted is listed, but I'm fairly certain that he is in fact not in this movie because the person listed in the credits at the end of the movie is a John R Walsh. If you're looking for a better and frankly more terrifying nuclear destruction-related drama, I recommend the British movie Threads.

If you missed this movie when it was first on in the early 1980s, then you should watch it now. It's probably out on DVD. The plot could be taken from today's headlines. However, it's not. The thought of terrorists getting their hands on a nuclear bomb seemed distant and unrealistic back in 1983. Today, it seems all too real. Three years ago, our troops in Afghanistan captured Al Qaeda documents that said it was "their religious duty" to obtain nuclear weapons. The movie was about a reporter and a cameraman who were taken hostage by "peace activists" on a tugboat in Charleston Harbor. The "peace activists" are actually terrorists. They're demanding that every nuclear detonators in the Charleston area be delivered to them to destroyed or else they'll explode a nuclear bomb of their own. Where did they get it? We don't know. We have to assume that it was stolen. What happens in the last ten minutes? You'll have to torture me to get that information out of me and even then I wouldn't tell you. Watch and find out yourselves.

This blew me away the first time I saw it in 1983, and if it effected me less this time, that's a mix of my knowing how it would unfold and the fact that news is different now and thus Special Bulletin often seems dated.

The movie actually captures the TV news of the time pretty well. The female anchor is a little annoying, but then Zwick and Herskovitz have always had problems creating likable, realistic women.

While done like a documentary, the drama unfolds with, well, more drama than one would expect in real life. The terrorists are well educated and sincere (in the 1970s terrorism often seemed to attract well-read, articulate nut-jobs, as opposed to today's illiterate whack jobs). Tensions rise rather more precipitously than is probably realistic, but it does make for a more interesting story.

Special Bulletin gets better and better as it progresses, with a rising of tension and horror that is hard to bear by the last half hour. The documentary device is well done and, in spite of dated qualities, does give you a sense of watching unfolding events.

Highly recommended.

An interesting insight into nuclear paranoia in the early 1980s, focused not on the Soviet cold war threat but on the possibility of home-grown American nuclear terrorism. This TV movie's fictional 'breaking news story' (War of the Worlds) format has been copied time and again on TV in the years since.

The film hasn't aged well but viewers should remember that this production predated The Day After, Threads, and the special effects technology we take for granted today.

It's also important to note that even when this was first aired, it was very bad TV. Kathryn Walker's performance as the overly emotional female news anchor was truly embarrassing, even in its day, and even the more skilled actors in the cast simply couldn't overcome the poor script and direction. As bad as TV was in the early 80s, it was rarely *this* bad.

Which makes this movie all the more interesting to watch at three in the morning with your drunk on. It's an antidote for nostalgia and a counter-example not only to the many other movies that did a better job with this subject, but most the television content we take for granted today.

I was in the studio of WMAR-TV the night this excellent "disaster" film was shown, due to the fact that the Management heard about our OTR Club and that we had WOTW in our collection. I was invited to watch the show and to compare it with the panic b/cast on the 11 o'clock news that followed.

I told them it was very well done, and was very realistic. Had they not had the disclaimers on the screen it could have well been taken for the real thing. I told them if they would have cast real reporters in the major roles it would have added something to the show. Orson Welles used real names of NY based reporters for the broadcast of WOTW which really gave it that authentic feeling. And with the "Secretary Of State" sounding like Roosevelt was the icing on the cake.

I pointed out that at the time Special Bulletin was aired the American public was not as gullible as they were in 1938.(We even played some clips of WOTW to compare it with Special Bulletin). We were on the brink of War and any program like that, would of course cause concern, which, unfortunately it did.

Al in all this film was very well done and was more or less a tribute to Orson Welles and WOTW.

JohnnyReb

Boy, that was very different of what I usually see and it was awesome! And how come I never ever heard of this film before? Thank you IMDb for always making me curious about everything presented here, because if it wasn't for a few researches on EMMY nominees and awards of 1983 I wouldn't be able to know and see "Special Bulletin", a truly special film that deserves more views from all kinds of public.

And who could have thought that the minds behind this film is the team Edward Zwick & Marshall Herskovitz, famous for films such as "Blood Diamond" and "Defiance" and many others? "Special Bulletin" is a TV film released in 1983 telling a fictional (but told in a very realistic way) news coverage of a terrorist group who took over the control of a ship, made a few hostages (including a reporter and a cameraman) with one demand: or the government release all the nuclear devices they had control in Charleston, South Carolina, or they will detonate a nuclear bomb in the city.

The whole film is presented as a news coverage coming from New York with two anchors (played by Ed Flanders and Kathryn Walker), and they present the situation inside the boat; other reports digging more and more about the characters of the situation, who they are and what they want. It is an hour and half picture that seems to go longer (in a good way) because you get hold to the whole thing, and it looks like a news report that you can't let go.

Everything looks real. Well, almost everything. There's a few goofs, few details that makes you realize that this is only a movie and people in the 1980's got very impressed with the material that the producers had to include in a few parts some notes informing that the whole thing wasn't happening, it was fiction. A few things that makes of "Special Bulletin" a real bulletin: Everything was filmed on video, with those old cameras that couldn't film properly at night without making a giant flash ruining the image (remember those images coming from the news? If you don't, look on the internet from news images of that decade, you're see what I'm talking about); the editing, the sound effects with noise problems, things that happens in live coverage, the relative unknown cast (now, we can recognize names like Lane Smith, David Clennon and David Rasche and there's a hilarious scene with Michael Madsen). What makes of this film unrealistic: some of the reactions presented in the whole situation seems forced (e.g. the guy with the machine gun walking outside of the boat looked so much like an actor playing a scene; and the anchors talks in some parts, it wasn't too natural). But it's nothing that ruins the experience of watching it.

I was surprised by the quality of this film, how every single thing works perfectly, from the great tension of the story to the actors performances; it really makes you look through a complete report that goes unfolding in front of you. The coverage made by the reporters in all of the country was interesting, you can see how news are made in such short time through investigations, live reports that goes on and off so fast, and the anchors have to figure out a way of telling everything to its audience, and more and more things are coming in the way, and they deal in a tragical situation (reserved to the last shocking minutes of the film).

Even today there's a gigantic impact while watching, and I'll probably never forget this wonderful experience. 10/10