Kubrick's cold war political satire is a masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (18 January 2017)

Although I haven't seen all Kubrick's movies, I dare to say that this is his magnum opus and probably one of the most brilliant anti- war manifest that art gave us. I feel that there's a lot to praise on this movie as a political satire: game theory reasoning of mutual assured destruction collapses due to a single insane individual whose power to destruct comes from a bureaucrat military protocol, that was supposed to insure the nation in case of a cataclysm; blinded military diligence leads to kamikaze and mass destruction; institutionalized hatred of the communists is exposed to absurd; the cold war leads to hysteria and self destructive behavior. The best thing is that such achievements are conjugated with an incisive literary content. Humor moments are abundant and each character seems to exactly fit its purpose. The story fails on cold war leading to nuclear holocaust but it is surely successful on capturing its dangers, its hysterical, tense and prejudiced environment and the disruptive political and military behavior associated with it. Since the early 1960's a lot of more visually and sonorously appealing movies were made, even by Kubrick himself, and cinema has assuredly evolved a lot since then but unfortunately, not many examples of such a brilliant combination of storytelling, artistic expression and art as a mean of intervention appeared since Strangelove.