THE ATOMIC BOWL: Football at Ground Zero & The Forgotten Bomb (2025) is on PBS on July 12

Greg Mitchell's latest is a quiet, but powerful punch in the face. Using a touch football game held in the ruins of Nagasaki as a focal point, the film reveals how how little we knew about atomic energy and how what we knew was controlled by the American government. It also makes it abundantly clear that there was absolutely no reason that the bomb should ever have been dropped. 

Greg Mitchell’s ATOMIC BOWL is going to rattle your cage. The film is a look at the football game that was played in the ruins of Nagasaki on first of January 1946.  It’s a film that shows how uninformed the American government was in the early days of the atomic age.

As with all of Mitchell’s films we aren’t getting just the story of the football game, but something more. This being a film from Greg Mitchell we get the well-researched and very detailed story of the events that led up to the game. But also we get the real story that he wanted to tell, which is how the Nagasaki bombing changed  the world and no one is talking about it. As Mitchell makes clear this second bombing wasn’t needed. The bombing was done because General Groves felt it had to be done. We can argue about whether the decision was right or wrong historically, but as the film points out the bombing changed warfare forever, it made civilian targets okay. The reason it made them okay is that the city had no military value. The bombing was just a show of force (one that should have brought more casualties  but the bomb went off course.)

The scary thing is that as Mitchell points out no one talks about the second bomb much. It’s an after thought that even discussions or films on the atomic bombs glance over (it’s only fleetingly mentioned in OPPENHEIMER). Mitchell tells us the story of the football game  not because it’s a great story, but because it allows him to discuss something that needs to be talked about. We need to know why its now okay to kill children.

The film is also a look at the damage everyone suffered as a result of the radiation. While you can chalk some of it to the fact that we didn’t know what the long term effects of the radiation, but as the film makes painfully clear a lot of it was the result of the American government hiding the horrors.

As I said at the top this film is going to rattle your cage. It’s  slow building gut punch that is going to leave you feeling battered and broken at the unexpected sadness of it. This is probably going to be the first great film of 2025 you’ll see.

Highly recommended