Mjeteconer Just perfect...

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Kamila Bell This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Steve Nyland (Squonkamatic) I have now seen this ingenious made for TV movie twice: Upon original broadcast and again last night via the marvel of the internet. In 1983 I was a high school sophomore who watched in thunderstruck awe as a dark fantasy of nuclear hell played out as vividly as it had in the music of the era which captivated me. Here at last was a suitable pop culture document of how senseless it all was, with even the well-intentioned terrorist/activists being as dead wrong as the suicidal federal policies they were trying to put a stop to. It scared the living crap out of me to say the least, ringing with authenticity and dead cold delivery. The few moments where the script tries to become pat and predictable are all undermined by the activities of the players. Normality is set aside.Upon second viewing now as a jaded adult approaching fifty some of the seams in the weave are evident. We've grown up in an era of 24hr cable news programming with one on the spot disaster coverage after another. The mother of all being coverage of the September 11th attacks, as riveting a 36 hours of nonstop news viewing endurance as I can recall. Then there's all those plane crashes, space shuttle disasters, hostage dramas, reality TV law enforcement shows, and the Ferguson riots, which were streamed live from people's smart phones. You can now pretty much cut out the middleman of the broadcast journalist and watch events unfold live via those who are there.So there's sort of a chicken-egg thing going on here: Which came first? The cinema-verity docudrama approach of speculative fiction, or the tradition of Americans tuning in on their TV sets to watch events of horror or spectacle happen before our eyes? Which was one of the aspects which made that 1983 viewing so unforgettable — The story *happened* to the viewer and could not be stopped or paused or Tivo'd to watch it later. You had to be tuned in and paying attention, and I am struggling now to recall how or even if I knew specifically to watch. It certainly would have been a priority viewing experience if told about it. I was a young suburban punk being prepared for the coming apocalypse by the music of The Clash, British Ska bands, artist/experimenters like Eno and King Crimson, and watched Carl Sagan's COSMOS religiously. It's fatalistic anti-nuclear theme was pure and rational enough to be convincing even without "Ivan Meets G.I. Joe". We were doomed as far as I was concerned. Just a matter of circumstance and POOF. There goes 6.5 billion years of evolution.None of what "Special Bulletin" depicts stretched outside the realm of what we thought was possible in 1983, and there wasn't opportunity to stop the proceedings during events to check IMDb or other resources (which didn't exist at the time) to try and make sense of what the hell was going on. You sort of have to surrender yourself to the passage of events shown, which was easier 32 years ago than it is now. Viewing with a 2015 sensibility the authenticity of certain moments suffer, specifically the final shootout where a live feed camera is allowed to capture the initial moments of the assault. First thing Delta would have done was get the goddamn cameras out of there, but then again this is as much a fantasy about the news media's irresponsible nature as it was about the nuclear incident. In such fantasies plausibility will be the first thing to go out the window.So scratch watching this for an authentic demonstration of how such an event could unfold. Watch it instead for the performances, all of which are pretty much dead on, David Clennon being especially convincing as the leader of the group. It is the staging of the interplay between the media personalities which dominate the proceedings being the main shortcoming for contemporary audiences. Or rather, subsequent experience with such broadcast events have rendered the approach taken by the writers as being naive. It's never that simple, and indeed the broadcast's finest moments are when events spiral out of control and leave the commentators bereft of anything to say. Because there is nothing to say at such times, and the best thing they could do was shut the hell up. At least they got that right.

David Powell 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.

Mark Mears 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.

SyxxNet 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...)