YMMV / On the Beach

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Which characters are quietly accepting of their fate, which ones truly do have hope of survival, and which are simply in shock and haven't processed the end of the world yet?
• Anvilicious: It should come as no surprise whatsoever that Shute was concerned about the dangers of Nuclear War. You don't get any less subtle in telling exactly what an all-out nuclear war might mean for humanity. This is a good message, however, and the novel was a recognition that Nuclear weapons were a game changer in terms of the threat they posed to the world at large. Some commentators however have argued that Shute's message was too strong, and that by perpetuating the idea that nobody could survive a nuclear war, stories like On the Beach might cause harm by implicitly suggesting that countermeasures like fallout shelters and Duck and Cover are pointless.
  "Most novels of apocalypse posit at least a group of survivors and the semblance of hope. On the Beach allows nothing of the kind."
• Harsher in Hindsight: The real USS Scorpion was lost with all hands under mysterious circumstances while investigating suspicious Soviet naval activity near the Azores in 1968. Though officially declared an accident, there exist some hints of possible hostile action. In 1995, US Navy Captain Peter Huchthausen mentioned Scorpion to Russian Admiral Viktor Dygalo while researching a book about a separate incident. Dygalo cryptically suggested a connection with the loss of the Soviet submarine K-129 and said the United States and Russia had an agreement to keep the truth of both incidents buried.
• Nightmare Fuel: An unstoppable wave of radioactive fallout will reach your country in a few months. Other countries have gone silent, and this wave of silence advances further south every week. Later on, even cities to your north have started to go silent. And then the government starts issuing cyanide pills...
• Special Effects Failure: The 2000 film. The Ferrari's explosion is not convincing, at all. Some of the greenscreening is pretty obvious, too.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The US flag on the submarine has forty-nine stars - showing that the film was made in the one year the flag only had that number. Additionally, the submarine is a Royal Navy model; those were used in Australia until 1967 when the Australian Royal Navy commissioned its own.

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