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Blu-ray release on the title's 45th Anniversary comes loaded with extras! Bonus material includes a new documentary (No Fighting In The War Room), a new featurette (Best Sellers or: Peter Sellers and Dr. Strangelove) and an interview with former Defense secretary Robert McNamara.
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By Elliot Shakespeare (New York)
This is a reasonably priced video of a classic Kubrick satire on the futility of planning for nuclear war in the Cold War era. It features wonderful performances by Peter Sellers (in three roles as the president, a British military officer, and, of course, Dr. Strangelove), George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson, Sterling Hayden as the crazed general who orders an attack on the Soviet Union, Slim Pickens as an Air Force pilot and James Earl Jones in his film debut. Although the extras are modest, I enjoyed the film's trailer (itself a brief classic) and the documentary about the making of the film. The documentary feature on Kubrick's career, however, is quite superficial and ends with the making of this film.
By Matthew T. Weflen (Chicago, IL)
The Film:
Kubrick's best film? Tough to say. 2001, A Clockwork Orange, and Spartacus are pretty darned good. One of the best dark comedies of the 20th Century? Easily. Probably the single best. Consistently, some times uproariously funny, "Dr. Strangelove" is an indisputable classic. It expertly weaves the paranoia and fear of the period with phenomenal comedic performances, to both funny and chilling effect. Peter Sellers is absolutely stunning in this film, as is George C. Scott. The nuclear farce escalates and escalates throughout the 90 minute run-time, ultimately culminating in... well, I won't spoil it.
Simply put, this is one of those films everyone should see before they die.
The Blu-Ray:
This is a tough disc to review. The movie is so incredibly good that it might be blinding to the flaws in the presentation. And flaws there are.
The first one that will strike anyone who's seen this film before on home video is that this film is not presented in the 1.33:1 "academy ratio." Instead, it is cropped to a 1.66:1 ratio which is very close to today's widescreen TVs, with *very* slender black bars on the sides.
Now, I'm as big a fan of widescreen images as the next guy. But I'm an even bigger fan of seeing everything the director intended me to see, i.e. the original aspect ratio of a piece of film. If Kubrick had decreed that this was the proper aspect ratio, that might be one thing. But Kubrick is dead. And as I compare this Blu-Ray to my DVD of the same film, I notice that there is a fair amount of information being cut off at the top and bottom of the frame. Is it the most revealing, story-critical stuff? No. Indeed, on the 1.33:1 DVD, there is a consistent black haze at the top and bottom of the frame, meaning the film was cropped a bit more towards widescreen from the outset. But real information is lost in this cropping, real set dressing, real props. So it kind of smarts to know it's gone. I wish the cropping had been done at a ratio a bit closer to "academy." I could have happily lived with wider black bars on the sides of the screen in exchange for more movie.
Another potentially problematic aspect of this transfer is video noise. I am a big proponent of film grain being presented realistically in a HD image. I don't want it scrubbed away by excessive "noise reduction." But this image strains my tolerance. Static backdrops and human faces positively swim with noise, much of which looks more "digital" than true "analog" film grain. I truly wonder whether a projected film print would have this kind of noise. Again, some sort of happy medium should have been achieved.
OK, bad news out of the way, I can still say that this is a highly watchable transfer. Blacks are much more solid than the previous DVD, and detail in some scenes is good (but not great). For a 45 year-old b&w presentation, this looks pretty good. It's not at the level of the recent "Casablanca" or "Seventh Seal" Blu-Rays, but it certainly holds its own.
Audio is presented in a 5.1 channel mix, as well as the original mono. The surround mix is pleasant, splitting some of the info (such as gunshots or airplane noise) out into the rear surrounds.
Extras are mostly carried over from the most recent DVD edition, with one new documentary included, and the film trailer tragically absent. It was a GREAT trailer, very 60's modern and cool. Really sad and kind of inexplicable that it was left out. The docs are presented in 480p, which is kind of lame. The "commentary" is a combination text overlay/video interview trivia track. Unfortunately, the text overlays pretty much half of the screen, making it tough to catch important parts of the film. The videos are interesting enough, but they talk over some key parts of the film, and some of the truly outstanding performances are obscured. Overall, the track is more irritating that it's worth, and I would have preferred a new 1080p documentary to it.
************
If you don't already own this, buy it. Just buy. Don't think. It's amazing, and an absolute must-own. Any of the above issues will not really matter to someone who doesn't own another edition. This one will do just fine.
If you do already have the more recent DVD edition, this is a tough recommendation. The picture quality is certainly better. There is more detail, better black levels, and fewer artifacts such as jagged edges and edge enhancement. But you're going to get a cropped image that may not square well (so to speak) with your recollection of the film you've seen before. And you'll be missing out on the classic trailer, in exchange for yet another superfluous documentary. So it's not really an upgrade. It's more of a lateral move from the DVD.
I still give the disc 4 stars. The film is 5-star material all the way. The BD presentation has some serious flaws, but it still is highly watchable and has a fair amount of value.
By J. Draper
I regard Dr. Strangelove as THE best Stanley Kubrick movie of all time. Peter Sellers triple role is amazing. George C. Scott actually agreed to do this movie to make an attempt at comedy in his career. I believe he pulled it off quite well as Gen. Buck Turgison. Sterling Hayden's portrayal as Col. Jack D. Ripper is unbelievable. I think one of the best scenes is when Ripper is in his office and asks Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (one of three Peter Sellers roles) to make him a drink of grain alcohol and rain water. Then he lights up this huge cigar and inhales a massive drag of smoke and looks into the camera with the smoke curling around his face. THAT was Kubrick's money shot right there, and then of course we the audience, find out exactly how stark raving mad Ripper is when he rambles into his diatribe about the massive commie plot to sap and unpurify his precious bodily fluids. I have watched this movie hundreds of times, and each time I laugh just as hard. The lunacy of it all and to think that Kubrick was laughing in the government's face in 1963 when this film was made ! Right smack in the meat of the Cold War, and this movie comes out. I remember my Dad was in the Air Force then, and this movie was actually BANNED around the WASH DC area where we lived at the time. Now THAT is a statement on Kubrick's art and mastery as a film maker. I love this movie, and wish more film makers had the balls Kubrick did in '63 when this was made.
By D. Reed (Elkton, MD USA)
I love political satire and it doesn't get any better than this! Having Peter Sellers in the mix (in three roles no less) just makes it that much better. I knew he was funny and could pull off a foreign accent in the Panther films but to pull off British, American and German? The man's a genius! One of my favorite lines of the film is when he tells the General and Russian Ambassador:
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"
The supporting cast is stellar as well; George C. Scott and Sterling Hayden are excellent as the war crazed and psychotic generals. Slim Pickens is outrageous as he rides his bomb to oblivion. The innuendo throughtout is quite amusing because you have to be quick to pick up on them, like the names of characters, phallic images and so on. The idea of "nuclear armageddon" has aged little with the passage of time, even after the Cold War has ended. The way this film holds up today is incredible (and judging from our current relations with North Korea, couldn't be summed up better than with this).
By Archimedes Tritium
After years of glowing positives, the movie turned out to be pretty bad when I finally saw it. Itching to eject after a few minutes so as to get on with something more meaningful in life (like caulking my bathtub), I did sit through it to see what could be salvaged. The passage of events has aged this movie terribly.
The method of the satire in this movie is to (a) take people who fought the Cold War, (b) put them in a contrived situation, (c) have them state many of their beliefs (from concerns about government mandated fluoridation to nuclear policy) in a bizarrely unrealistic context created by the film-makers so as to make them look foolish.
The beliefs themselves aren't analyzed. Fictional events are instead arranged to make them look nutty by association. You are quickly taught who to laugh at on cue, like conditioning Pavlov's dogs. If someone has idea X, you know you are supposed to laugh at them and that's approved.
It is the approach of lazy pseudo-intellectuals everywhere. This movie shows the tedious shape of modern liberal thought, bigotry, and prejudice in the process of forming, before it ravaged the country in the late 60's down to the present, degrading hundreds of millions of lives along the way. Same thing with Sarah Palin and Saturday Night Live; instilling conditioned reflex responses so people don't have to think.
Since history and Soviet archives have shown the Cold War architects to have been correct in their assessment of just about everything (i.e., McCarthy was right), the mocking in "Dr. Strangelove" just looks foolish.
It's the sort of movie people who want to appear sophisticated go to and say they liked to get in with the "enlightened elite" for having "correct" thinking.
Dr. Strangelove himself is a minor character, having ~5 minutes of material out of 1.5 hours. Apparently the joke with him is that he can't control his arm, which keeps wanting to "Heil Hitler" salute, etc., as he discusses plans with generals and President. I don't know why that's funny or interesting. It's boring and stupid. Sort of like Monty Python -- if you think MP is clever and deep like most 12 year olds, you'll like Dr. Strangelove.
Many interesting and thoughtful things could have been done about the Cold War, the effort to halt an ideology bent on enslaving the world to the will of an elite that thought itself better and more enlightened than everyone, but was really just a systematically defective understanding of reality.
Dr. Strangelove is an echo of this elite and their defective understanding of reality trying to lull asleep the masses they despise, by trying to mock and ridicule people who correctly acted against them to all of our benefit.
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