A test of dialogue writing!

Rating: Null/10 (31 December 2000)

Writer David Self did himself a favour by not working on this script with anyone else. As a self written screenplay based on the book The Kennedy Tapes - Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, Self has manufactured a painstakingly difficult script filled with the merry go round of conflict between the U.S. and the USSR in October 1962. These two nations almost went to war over the Russian's stockpile of nuclear missiles in Cuba and the U.S. stockpile in Turkey. Both sides are made to look responsible for this conflict. The snappy direction by Roger Donaldson put me in mind of some of his most tense moments during 1987's No Way Out' which also starred Kevin Costner. Here, Costner plays Kenny O'Donnell, the President's highest ranking aide. Bruce Greenwood, a Canadian, and Steven Culp, play John and Robert Kennedy with accents which are mastered beautifully. This film is never boring. The frenzy becomes a bit much after the first hour and forty-five minutes and then continues for another forty minutes or so but as a lesson in history, it seems, for a film, pretty authentic to its historical facts. They really do show how we came within a hair of ending the world before one side backed down.