Who payed the critics

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Three years before this live rendition of Fail Safe, George Clooney led the ER cast (the Michael Crichton one, not the 1980s comedy one) in a live broadcast of Ambush, the fourth season opener.This is a compelling drama and one almost blooper came to mind. It was when the maid almost kind of fell down the stairs carrying the washing basket. That would have been an interesting blooper for sure. The ending was very tragic, and I wonder why New York was fingered to be the sacrificial city. Why not another city? You can imagine the President didn't even bother campaigning in New York at the following presidential election, ceding it to his opponent, and losing a significant chunk of the Electoral College vote.

The films are nearly identical in terms of plot, pacing, and scenes, but the execution is slightly different.The movie is set in the 1960's at the height of the Cold War. It's actually weird to think that there are now living adults who were born AFTER the Cold War, so I don't know if the mindset of those times can ever be known by future generations. Looking back, of course a nuclear arms race is madness, so its easy to see why a film like Failsafe catches on with certain crowds. The central theme of the film is that humanity was/is playing with fire. Nuclear weapons are a threat to all humanity and it only takes one mistake for the worst to happen. That mistake happens through a series of events, any one of which could have been corrected of prevented. What follows is a tense blow-by-blow of trying to correct those mistakes and prevent even worse tragedies from occurring. This is told from the point of views of a bomber crew, the men at NORAD, the Pentagon, and the President. All the actors do a good job in their roles; there are no villains in the film. Everyone has justifiable reasons for their actions.My complaints are that the role of the doctor was either intentionally or mistakenly watered down. In the original, Walter Matthau played an incredibly smart and pragmatic expert who actually makes good points about nuclear war. I felt like the doctor in this one was made to be a farce and a punching bag for the Left Wing.Anyway, this version of the story is good, but not as good as the original. Its still full of suspense and it has that cold realism that most thriller films lack.

With the end of the arms race between the United States and Russia this film does not have the urgency of the earlier production. While the cast is composed of some very talented actors, they are simply not a match for the original cast. This goes to prove my point that some films should not be remade. Richard Dreyfus just doesn't come across as the president. And most of the other cast members were miscast as well. The story was close enough to be the original, and the look of shooting in black and white was a good choice. It is only in that medium that the stark horror of what has happened could be told. While this was certainly not a bad film or an awful film it simply misses that something that the 1964 feature had. I have rated it 7 out of 10.

The Fail Safe 2000 version simply does not match the 1964 film masterpiece's acting or drama.I'm an USAF veteran who worked with the real Fail Safe system (not the correct name by the way) and the 1964 version rang all too true to me.Henry Fonda's acting was right on target, so to speak, and brought back some memories of a very tense time in world history.The 2000 version just seemed like a half-hearted remake without the compelling drama and performances of the 1964 original film.Food for thought: The USAF command and control authority kept the largest arsenal of weapons in the history of mankind under perfect control for decades--without a glitch--until it was no longer needed after the Soviet Union's collapse. The movie dramatized the effects of accidental --or deliberate--use of nuclear weapons which is commendable. It is not a topic to be taken lightly.