What a great find. Fine British film that seems pretty unknown but should be considered a classic and studied. It feels like a sci-fi/disaster version of The Wire.
I’ll let a few words from a biographer and director Val Guest himself describe this the best way it could be:
“At a time when the vast majority of science fiction films were populated by aliens, blobs and bug-eyed monsters, Val Guest brought his trademarks of intelligence, seriousness and realism to the genre…Perhaps inspired by his background as a journalist, Guest chose to shoot his fantasy films in a gritty documentary style…’That’s the only way to make the unbelievable believable…You have to do these science fiction things like you would any other drama…I tried to present them like strange but very real events at which a camera just happened to be present.'”
Amen.