Rent Fail Safe (2000)

Star studded cast - Fail Safe review by CP Customer

A host of stars join the cast for a brilliant Clooney production, ably directed by Stephen Frears. The camera style is unusual for a film; it feels more like a TV drama or a play and the black and white medium adds to the nostalgia. Set in the cold war era, probably the 60's, it's a story of machine induced error causing a nuclear disaster between USA and the Soviet Union. Tense and thought provoking. The acting is superb; Dreyfuss as the President is outstanding.

Nuclear Nerves and Human Failings - Fail Safe review by griggs

There’s a particular kind of existential dread that comes from realising life doesn’t pause, even when the world feels one bad decision away from oblivion. Growing up in the late ’70s, I often wondered how my parents got on with the business of living while the threat of nuclear annihilation lingered in the background. Then again, my mum was born in the middle of the Second World War — conceived while her father grabbed a brief leave from the army, London still under night-time bombardment. Humanity has a habit of pushing forward, whether through resilience or sheer stubbornness.

The Cuban Missile Crisis is usually held up as the closest we came to nuclear war. It’s not an unreasonable claim — it was a genuine standoff with documented near-launch moments — but no one can say with total certainty that it was the closest. Plenty of incidents, from the 1983 Soviet false alarm to various hardware failures, suggest we’ve stumbled to the brink more than once. And with the Doomsday Clock now set at 90 seconds to midnight (not 89), the tightest margin in its history, the sense of fragility hasn’t eased. As the Bulletin’s scientists have warned, even a one-second shift is meant to signal “extreme danger” and the rising risk of global catastrophe.

Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe channels that anxiety with unnerving clarity. It’s lazily framed as the “serious” alternative to Dr. Strangelove, but that flattens both films. Kubrick lampoons the absurdity of deterrence; Lumet shows what happens when all the satire drains away and only fate — cold, procedural, merciless — remains.

Like 12 Angry Men, the film thrives in claustrophobic rooms where powerful men make catastrophic choices shaped not by pure ideology but by prejudice, arrogance, and blind faith in technology. A simple malfunction snowballs into a crisis that rational minds seem increasingly powerless to contain. Every attempted correction digs the hole deeper.

As the story reaches its shattering final movement, we get freeze-frames of ordinary New Yorkers — families in the park, shoppers, office workers — entirely unaware they’re seconds from annihilation. They’re images we’ve seen a thousand times in films, but here the familiarity makes them unbearable. There’s no heroic pilot, no clever hack, no last-minute reprieve. Just inevitability.

The ending refuses spectacle. No blast. No mushroom cloud. Only silence — a void where a city used to be. Then comes the title card: the U.S. government insists the events portrayed “could not occur.” Factually, that reassurance mirrors statements made during the film’s release. Emotionally, it lands closer to a dare than a comfort. Are you certain?

Watching Fail Safe now, with AI and automated systems increasingly integrated into military decision-making, its warnings feel freshly sharpened. It’s tempting to fear the machine — the misfiring algorithm or rogue model — but Lumet points the blame squarely back at us. Systems break because people do: through overconfidence, bias, or misplaced faith in procedure. Technology may accelerate the consequences, but human fallibility remains the decisive factor.

That’s the sting in Fail Safe. It denies easy answers, denies absolution, and leaves you with that quiet, unsettling sense that we may have skirted disaster more often than we’d like to admit — and may do so again.

And beneath all the policy talk and protocol diagrams sits a simpler truth: the film is about human failure as much as technological collapse. People trust the wrong voices, cling to rules when compassion is required, and sacrifice reason for the illusion of control.

If only Henry Fonda really were President.