milne@uci-icse (09/01/85)
From: Alastair Milne <milne@uci-icse> My impression of Fail Safe is that it is such a powerful story, with such extreme relevance to today's world situation, that the odd technical blunder in special effects (which I must confess I didn't actually observe) hardly seems worth notice -- though one hopes they wouldn't take that as a license to let the same mistakes go again. Henry Fonda as the president, and Larry Hagman as the Russian-language interpreter Peter Buck, give very impressive performances. Walter Matthau is chilling as the political sciences professor Walter Grotoschele, who talks calmly of making a nuclear war winnable, and wants to take advantage of the accident to "get them before they get us": i.e., turn the accident into a genuine first strike against Moscow. Fritz Weaver plays the colonel in the Omaha war room who freezes when given a presidential order to give the Russians what they need to know to shoot down American bombers, simply unable to obey. Throughout, the film is a powerful look at the interplay of strong and conflicting personalities thrust together to try to resolve a situation of global impact, and also of the consequences of abdicating too much responsibility to one's tools (Grotoschele, for instance, honestly believes that humans can take over as soon as something goes wrong in a computer's actions, and would base a defense system on that belief). A strong story, and the movie is an unusally faithful rendering of the book. Alastair Milne