Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

User Review

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  Barneyonmovies

  8 / 10

  WHAT I LIKED: 'Dr Strangelove' is Stanley Kubrick at his most overtly theatrical and humorous, and in that regard you could argue that it's Stanley Kubrick at his most Stanley Kubrick. Yes as far as I'm concerned it's clear throughout his entire filmography that Kubrick is a filmmaker heavily drawn to humorous exhibitionism and physical theatricality (his style frequently owes rather a lot to the likes of early silent comedies in fact), and he undoubtedly embraces that stuff in this film to a greater extent than anywhere else.
  
  That's largely because it's a cold-war satire of course so humour is very much the expected order of operations, but the over-the-top, caricature delivery of the performances and the stagey nature of the filmmaking is very interesting indeed. Kubrick lingers his camera a little too long on things to drive his points home, he cuts starkly to give amusingly extreme perspectives on events, he uses over-dramatic music to an almost sarcastic degree, and he directs his cast to deliver things in an extremely exaggerated fashion. That style generally means he can successfully rely on a very showy form of showing and not telling, but here it also makes for a very successful satire as it really does belittle its characters and broadcast their incompetence clearly. That's often very amusing, and it's also unquestionably pretty brave when you consider what the subject matter is.
  
  WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: It's certainly nothing more than a theatrical satire this, and as a result there's no focus on developing character or serious nuance whatsoever which does affect how engaging it can really be.
  
  VERDICT: I would say that 'Dr Strangelove' is the Stanley Kubrick film that everyone should watch first. It's an over-the-top, theatrical satire which sees Kubrick at his most Kubrick, and that's both a good and a bad thing.

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