The inevitable has occurred: I've watched a hugely popular and acclaimed film and come away scratching my head, wondering what on earth is so special about it. But don't revoke my Letterboxd membership just yet: do me the favor of hearing me out first.

Dr Strangelove is obviously a sacred cow in film circles, and I can see why. It's often hilarious, sometimes visually striking, and full of excellent performances and dialogue. It's a funny film about a thoroughly unfunny situation. It's a perfect satire, really. But it left me completely cold.

Perhaps that's because I'm eighteen and therefore my memory (or even my parents' memories) doesn't extend back to a time when nuclear annihilation seemed almost imminent, and my…

Despite being one of the finest examples of genre-filmmaking that's neatly crafted, superbly scripted & wonderfully performed, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove is a film that I admire more than I love. I've no hesitation in calling it the ultimate black comedy or the perfect satire but I also won't deny that my experience with it was rather ordinary, regardless of the few laughs in between.

Set during the Cold War era, the story of Dr. Stangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb concerns a paranoid Air Force General who green lights a nuclear attack on Soviet Union without the knowledge of his superiors, thus causing mass panic in the Pentagon War Room where the President, his…

“Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.”

Laughter is such a strange thing. We laugh because we’re happy. We laugh because we find something amusing. We laugh to displace our discomfort. We laugh because otherwise we might cry. We laugh because we don’t know how else to react. Same response, so many different triggers. The past decade has seen those non-traditional triggers frequently exploited by “cringe comedies” like Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office; laughing at uncomfortable or sad situations has become all the rage. But it’s one thing to laugh at the absurdity of a politically incorrect…

Stanley Kubrick’s film features a scenario where a madman triggers a nuclear attack.. that scenario is absolutely absurd! Oh wait we have a madman currently in office as I speak within close proximity of the football and he has the codes! Where are those underground mines again? Excuse me whilst I go pack my bags ;-)

I know it is meant to be a black comedy but seriously between human error, mechanical failure, military/government snafu's, paranoid warmongers, Murphy's Law, mental instability, ignorance and extremism should ANYONE have these capabilities? Yeah it's a Laugh-O-Rama if you're totally oblivious as to just how close we truly are or have been to reserving a seat next to Slim Picken's on his gleeful ride…

This works on an opposite principle from most comedies: rather than trying to rapidly deliver as many jokes as possible, Kubrick instead tends to drag one joke out as long as possible, as slow and measured as the principles the suspense of the film are built on. The blithe mundanity with which the film draws out tense situations —like a direly important phone call bogged down with pleasantries, the realization of insanity, or the recitation of nuclear protocol instructions— ends up highlighting the absurdity that lies within the contrast. The mechanism for both comedy and suspense being so intertwined within the cavernous, airless spaces of the film seems a counterintuitive one, but it ends up paying off massively with regards…