It’s the end of the world as we know it. And it won’t be fine — at least according to the cautionary documentary “Countdown to Zero.” There may be no more important public concern or one less welcome subject for a late-summer movie jaunt: Warning! At any minute, an errant nuclear bomb could “incinerate the heart of a major city.”
With relatively accessible technologies, slipshod international controls and highly motivated terrorists, it has only been through dumb luck that millions of people haven’t been vaporized before now, apparently. Director-writer Lucy Walker (The Devil’s Playground”) and producer Lawrence Bender (“An Inconvenient Truth”) present a straightforward and frighteningly convincing alert about how close we’ve been in the past, how simply it could happen today, and the horrific physical and societal fallout of a detonation.
