The film writers Robert Rubsam and Corey Atad join the show for a discussion of two apocalyptic nuclear thrillers, Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe (1964) and Kathryn Bigelow’s brand new Netflix production A House of Dynamite.
Both Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe were released by Columbia Pictures within months of each other in 1964 (as the result of a lawsuit stemming from the respective novels the films were based on). The two films depict an accidental nuclear crisis from the perspective of command-and-control rooms helpless to prevent the impending bombing but Lumet’s version is a serious critique of Game Theory from a humanist perspective, with the participation of creatives who had been caught up in the Hollywood Blacklist during the Cold War.
Bigelow’s modern version of such a tale of nuclear crisis, by contrast, has a lot less to say about the subject. We compare its structural shortcomings to Lumet’s stark masterpiece, a film more plugged in to its zeitgeist than this new Netflix production is.
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