Brilliant Satire But Dated Message

Rating: Null/10 (14 March 1999)

First off, I'm not going to dispute the point that Peter Sellers establishes himself as the last great comic genius there ever was in this film. He is brilliant. The satirical thrust is brilliant. From a technical standpoint, Strangelove is a great film.
Someday though, someone is going to ask that a reality check be taken for those who keep insisting that Strangelove is "timeless" or is still dead-on in it's message today. Because in the long run of history, Strangelove's underlying philosophy is as laughably dated as the "Duck And Cover" civil defense films it effectively satirizes. America kept building its nuclear arsenal, and guess what? We didn't blow each other up over a foolish misunderstanding. The Soviet Union in fact, folded up and collapsed when they realized they couldn't keep up with the demands of an arms race. In short, the system that Strangelove lambastes, worked.
Strangelove is more fascinating as an eerie foreshadowing of the destruction in Cold War consensus that took place in American society in the late 1960s, for it is a film that is ultimately pushing the odious concept of "moral equivalence" that the collapse of Communism proved was a silly idea to begin with. A brilliant film Strangelove is, but timeless it isn't. The laughs it generates in me, when they aren't caused by Peter Sellers, are caused more by how unintentionally silly its philosophy is in the post-Cold War world.