Review – Fail Safe

This would make a great double feature with Doctor Strangelove, a movie of almost identical theme that stole most of the thunder from this picture when it was released earlier in the same year (1964). Unlike Kubrick’s comedic end-of-the-world masterpiece, this round is a dead serious exploration of the hazards of the uneasy detente that ruled the nuclear world at the time. Oh, and this time around the catastrophe is triggered by an accident rather than by a madman. The plot often bogs down in extended dissertations on war and morality or digresses on the technical minutiae of nuclear combat. However fascinating such matters might be to Cold War buffs everywhere, they do tend to bring the plot to a screeching halt every time one comes up. Even the story line tends to play out like one of those hypothetical exercises they used to give us in junior high to help teach us to think about people in terms of political triage rather than as individual human beings. That aside, the movie’s only serious failing is that the comedic version is a lot easier to cope with. Mildly amusing