Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
After the insane General Jack D. Ripper initiates a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, a war room full of politicians, generals and a Russian diplomat all frantically try to stop it.
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What critics compared Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb to
Another way of looking at it, though, is as the most entertaining Hollywood movie on the subject of potential mass destruction since Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove.
It’s like Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant Dr. Strangelove, but without any of that 1964 film’s scathing satire—this is deadly serious stuff.
In comparison, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) might very well be the greatest examination of the Cold War and nuclear fallout precisely because it doesn’t shy away from its ending.
…films like Fail Safe or Dr Strangelove have suggested, we’re not much more than human error away from the end of the world…
The heyday of nuclear conflict thrillers was 1964, when the grim collateral damage of Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe and the megaton satire of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove were released.
Stanley Kubrick’s satirical Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb…
Surrounding all this is the federal government in its usual chaos, with a President (Stephen Colbert, obviously) who thinks he can negotiate a truce with the music from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a series of war room scenes that quite deliberately evoke Dr. Strangelove.
Yet, despite the presence of a War Room and a Buck Turgidson-type (named General W.R. Monger, and voiced by Jack Bauer), there's not a hint of Dr. Strangelove to be found.
Of course there are nods to everything pop culture has held dear for the last 60 years, from Star Trek to Dr. Strangelove to the illicit thrill we get from disaster movies that destroy beloved landmarks.
Some of it works quite well, particularly the Dr. Strangelove-inspired scenes in the war room where the U.S. President (Stephen Colbert) is in constant danger of starting nuclear war because the big red launch button looks exactly like the button that produces a cappuccino.
But Morrisâ?? precision as co-writer and director finds echoes of Dr. Strangelove , as well as a form of transcendence in the ridiculous.
Relating Four Lions to the brilliant Dr. Strangelove (1964) -- as some have -- is like relating a firecracker to a nuclear weapon.
We knew watching Dr. Strangelove that the crazed military types, George C. Scott’s Buck Turgidson and Sterling Hayden’s Jack D. Ripper, were liberal punching bags.
He even shows how the official response will be at once a whitewash and an encouragement to the conspiracy-prone future generation of jihadists: 'The police shot the right man," intones a government official, summoning the black tone of Dr. Strangelove, 'but the wrong man exploded."…
I'm certainly not making the comparison, but Four Lions has the balls of a Network, a Dr. Strangelove, and a M*A*S*H.
It’d be hard to fault Chi-Raq for fixating so hard on the battle-of-the-sexes angle and on jokes about the Greek classics (plus Dr. Strangelove, still the standard for putting an Aristophanes-esque sensibility on film), since that’s also true of the source material.
Lysistrata and her women occupy the National Guard Armory by seducing the staff (including David Patrick Kelly's Confederate apologist, General King Kong (a nod to " Dr. Strangelove ") and move the local chapter of a fez-wearing, African-American fraternal organization (led by the great Steve Harris of "The Practice") to lead a counter-protest and plan an insurgency to end what they believe to be an unconscionable dry spell.
In a film crowded with colorful cameos — Wesley Snipes as a one-eyed gangster, Angela Bassett as a community leader and Samuel L. Jackson as a combination of stand-up comedian, street prophet and Greek chorus, just for starters — and loaded up with film-school winks and nods to “Doctor Strangelove” and “Patton” and whatever else I didn’t notice on first viewing, it’s tough for one actor to stand out.
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Peter Sellers was funny in “ Dr. Strangelove ” (one of this movie's many inspirations) because the story was funny.
Rod Steiger does an amusing enough take on Dr. Strangelove's Buck Turgidson, Glenn Close brings some star power to the role of the First Lady, and Martin Short is a Presidential aide who meets the Martians in the White House's "Kennedy Room," a secluded nook where he unwittingly tries to seduce an alien dressed up as a big-haired, pointy-breasted sexpot (Lisa Marie, the Burton flame who played Vampira in Ed Wood) -- in an earlier scene, it's made clear that the aliens studied human sexuality in the pages of an old issue of Playboy.
Operation Avalanche is in many ways a Dr. Strangelove tribute, a found-footage Sixties caper wherein a team of CIA spooks infiltrate NASA and fake a moon landing to help win the Cold War.
The film owes much of its bite to the spirit of Doctor Strangelove, and it behooves one to remember that film became more, not less farcical as the stakes got higher.
Not only does the film visit the Shepperton Studios set of 2001 and get his autograph, it starts with a mention of the CIA investigation into whether he was a spy after Dr Strangelove pointed out the absurdities of the Cold War.
They are helping investigate Kubrick and Dr. Strangelove — an actual thing that the CIA did back in the day — when they finds out their employers are planning to send an agent into NASA to hunt down a possible Soviet mole.
Making this concept into an outright farce would have taken the most subtle and clever of comic directors, and I don't know that we have anybody working in America right now who'd be able to do it; Stanley Kubrick in his Dr. Strangelove mode is what it's looking for, and that is a powerful rare commodity.
As I dipped in and out of the various moods of Seeking a Friend, I began to miss the uncompromising satire of bravura end-of-the world movies such as Dr. Strangelove.
That has a little to do with the fact that some of the retro stylings aren't that wobbly, and that production designer Chris Seagers does the great Ken Adam proud, concocting war rooms and submarine interiors and cockpits and hangars that evoke the best work of Ken Adam (He of course designed not just all the Bond films of the '60s, but also " Dr. Strangelove ," which is not inadvertently evoked in this film's rewriting of the Cuban Missile Crisis as a battle between good and evil mutants.).
Channelling the aesthetics of the Sixties spy thriller, down to the dancing dolly birds and Dr Strangelove war rooms, antagonists plotting global war from the white leather recliners of a submarine that detaches from a yacht in a display of pure Bond excess, X-Men: First Class is having a great deal of fun without entering the Austin Powers -like realm of absolute, irredeemable silliness.
Familiar characters are given new, younger faces while various histories and interrelationships are fleshed out against a backdrop of 1960s mod styles (courtesy of James Bond) and Cold War tensions (courtesy of Dr. Strangelove).
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A Wag the Dog, or maybe even a Dr. Strangelove, for the Iraq War, it goes behind the scenes at 10 Downing Street and in Washington, DC, to show how non-existent data and deceptive semantics can be twisted into the deaths of thousands by the ruthless and feckless.
Imagine a mashup of Dr. Strangelove and Wag the Dog, and you've got the general idea.
Drawing upon Wag the Dog, Dr. Strangelove and This Is Spinal Tap, this sardonic tale is adapted from the critically acclaimed BBC series The Thick of It.
But Iannucci, bless him, made the same realisation that Stanley Kubrick did when he was making Dr. Strangelove : when something is too absurdly awful to even contemplate realistically, the only way to treat it is as a colossal black joke.
Showing how politicians, in all their petty ambition and narrow self-interest, can be every bit as dangerous as Weapons of Mass Destruction, this is Dr Strangelove for the post-9/11 era.
While wildly aware that Don’t Look Up is absolutely a political satire that applies a dash of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Network (1976), and Wag the Dog (1997) with a nice helping of Armageddon (1998), the way in which an extinction-level event serves as the metaphor for climate crisis doesn’t always land because of the ever-present concern of COVID-19 and its variants.
Perfectly pitched and terrifically timed at the end of a year in which the war against truth intensified and the climate crisis facing humanity was made even more explicit than before, Don’t Look Up is likely to go down as this generation’s Dr. Strangelove .
Bearing similarities to Dr. Strangelove and Network , but without their comedic nimbleness, Don’t Look Up bears unmistakable allusions to the world’s present pandemic crisis.
They’re rational thinkers who unwittingly stumble into a Dr. Strangelove type of situation when they discover mankind’s impending doom, and team up with Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan) to report their findings to President Orlean (Meryl Streep).
The reductive dramaturgy feels perfectly represented in DiCaprio’s character monologuing about how “the President is lying” on television, which ultimately is closer to the treacly liberalism of, say, Rob Reiner’s Shock and Awe than the edge of the aforementioned Southland Tales or even the holy grail of Dr. Strangelove .