# Apocalypse: War of Worlds (1945-1991) (2019)

> A six-part French documentary series charting the superpower rivalry between the capitalist West and the Soviet East from 1945 to 1991.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/80410

## Facts

- Seasons: 1
- Episodes: 6
- Episode runtime: 52 min
- Status: Ended
- Genres: documentary, history
- Created by: Isabelle Clarke, Daniel Costelle, Mickaël Gamrasni
- Network: France 2
- Cast: Mathieu Kassovitz, Jack Ruby, Gamal Abdel Nasser
- TMDB rating: 8.2/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8589702/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: measured
- Intensity: moderate
- Complexity: accessible
- Violence: moderate
- Tone: sober, elegiac, measured, tense, authoritative

## Synopsis

Apocalypse: War of Worlds (2019) is a French national-television documentary series created by Isabelle Clarke, Daniel Costelle and Mickaël Gamrasni for France 2. Narrated by Mathieu Kassovitz, the six-episode miniseries of roughly 52 minutes each traces the decades between 1945 and 1991, when the capitalist West, led by the ever-powerful United States, stood against the Communist East and the Soviet Empire. Rather than dramatized characters, the series is built from archive footage and a steady authoritative voice that moves episode by episode through the crises, standoffs and shifting alliances that defined the postwar world. Its engine is the escalating confrontation itself: how two systems competed for influence across continents while the threat of nuclear annihilation hung over every decision. The tone is sober, measured and weighty, more elegy than polemic, with an atmosphere of dread threaded through the sweeping chronology. It is a single-season limited miniseries with a documentary's restraint, a setting in cold war era global politics rather than any single city, and a grand scope that fans of The Cold War and The World at War will find familiar. Viewers drawn to large-scale history told through found film will find its pacing deliberate and its perspective wide.

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