All movies are about the present, especially those set in the past or future. Hairdressers working on Hollywood Westerns in the silent era or the 1930s, 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s attempted verisimilitude by researching period photographs. Yet they all ended up with dos that defined the decades in which they sheared, curled, and set.You could not ask for a better display of 1960s vogue than “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Of course, if a movie is any good it will adumbrate the future even as it captures its own day.

Peter Watkins’s “The War Game” (1965) derives its enduring power by drawing on the past to speculate about the future while documenting the present. If that sounds complicated, consider the film’s use of tense. Mr. Watkins’s 47-minute film depicts the possible effects of a nuclear war as shown through faux-documentary footage and interviews with survivors whose travails replicate the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo, as well as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In short, what will be has already been. Sort of like “Plan Nine From Outer Space,”in which Criswell assures us that we’ll be seeing exactly what happened in the future.

The effectiveness of the “The War Game” depends on the degree of fear in the land. During the decades when nuclear war receded into a memory-lane jaunt, motored by détente, the movie may have played as a period piece, quaint in its use of amateur actors looking into the camera and saying, no, they never heard of radiation or strontium 90. It’s different now, as Pakistan and India play the war game with multiplying nuclear warheads, going for the gold against North Korea and Iran, while Americans evolve from color-coded terror to outrage over gas prices.

Mr. Watkins is anti-war of any kind; or rather, he pleads for recognition of what war entails. His most terrifying shots, achieved with a shaky camera, grisly makeup, and wind blowers, tell us that this is what we can expect, since the same conditions existed in Europe and Japan during the last war. It’s one thing to read about a firestorm and learn of the body count, and another to see it, even in a re-creation done on the cheap, albeit rather ingeniously, for British television.

“The War Game” was a film of its time. Movies about nuclear devastation were solid commercial bets between the late 1950s and mid-1960s. But they were all rather antiseptic. “The World, the Flesh and the Devil” and “On the Beach” nattered on about how lonely it would be for the survivors (even dead bodies mysteriously vanished); “Fail Safe” sacrificed New York to melodramatic equity; and the incomparable “Dr. Strangelove” taught us to stop worrying — how lovely are mushroom clouds rising to the strains of Vera Lynn. Mr. Watkins shows an accretion of small details, from shattered tea cups to blinded children to burnings and shootings and riots and the complete breakdown of society.

When he submitted his short film to his masters at the BBC, he was the hottest young filmmaker in British television. A year earlier, he had made the prize-winning “Culloden,” a no less censorious you-are-there re-creation of the British slaughter of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Scottish Highlanders. A portrait of corruption, incompetence, and retaliatory bloodthirstiness verging on genocide, it showed Mr. Watkins to be a resourceful, tenacious, angry young man with a gimlet eye for demonstrative faces.The Brits loved it: They could look 1746 square in the eye without flinching.

Yet the BBC flatly refused to broadcast “The War Game.” According to Patrick Murphy’s essay and commentary included with the DVD, detractors complained that Mr. Watkins had slandered not only the civil service but the English people who, far from panicking, would surely behave in a nuclear holocaust with the same fortitude they displayed during the blitz.

Perhaps they would. “The War Game”is far too outraged to explore the character of the people or the times in which they live; its Kent is a claustrophobic village removed from the Beatles and other aspects of popular culture that would dominate Watkins’s next film. The men and women on the street are none too bright, and news from abroad is every bit as absurd as an Ed Wood or Stanley Kubrick movie. Apparently English and American bishops at an Ecumenical Council at the Vatican signed off on the following statement: “The church must tell the faithful that they should learn to live with, though not love, the nuclear bomb, provided that it is ‘clean’ and of a good family.”

If the portrait is neither full nor fair, it makes the undeniable case that neither the people nor their leaders were prepared for the devastation that pop paranoia constantly promised. A more revealing film than “The War Game” might have been made about its reception. Mr. Watkins renounced the censorship of his work, creating sufficient indignation to secure a feature film release. America welcomed it with neighborly cheer, giving it the 1966 Academy Award for best documentary feature — a double stretch given its length and speculation: Isn’t a fake documentary, by definition, a fake documentary?

It was a different story when Mr. Watkins turned his gaze on the New World. Having endured brickbats for “Privilege” (1967), in which rock ‘n’ roll is treated as the opium of the welfare state, and “The Gladiators” (1969), in which war is reduced to a sporting event, he visited the American southwest for “Punishment Park” (1971), imagining the desert as a firing range in which dissidents are the ducks.No Oscars for that; not even distribution.

“The Cinema of Peter Watkins” is an important series from Project X in collaboration with New Yorker Video, restoring the work of one of the few filmmakers whose vision is shored up by a sense of mission. It’s a mistake, however, to pigeonhole Mr. Watkins as a nattering voice of the left. He’s an artist in a way Michael Moore can never be, having no need to curry favor, flatter the audience, or celebrate himself (except in a few liner note treatises). Mr. Watkins is offensive because he is pitiless in handling the dystopian tactic of stretching bad news to the breaking point. Even Huxley and Orwell found silver linings. In “The War Game” and “Culloden,” historic re-creations of past and future prohibit such niceties.

Mr. Giddins’s latest book, “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books,” is available from Oxford University Press.