Stanley Kubrick’s morbidly brilliant, still-hilarious satire on the Cold War returns to the Odyssey for its 60th anniversary.
At the height of political tension between America and the USSR, mad US general Jack D. Ripper orders a nuclear attack on Russia, vowing to stop it from corrupting America’s “vital bodily fluids”. The world’s leaders and military scramble to stop this from starting a chain of events leading to Doomsday – but bureaucracy and bizarre human failings on all sides make this difficult. Before 2001, Kubrick strove to make a chilling study of the looming apocalypse from a thriller novel but soon found the reality too ridiculous to play straight. This made for an impeccably constructed, beautifully silly farce that holds up all too well, lit up by Ken Adam’s sets and an incredible, triple-role Peter Sellers performance.
