Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Movie Info

Genre(s): War

Written by: Peter George (novel Red Alert, aka Two Hours to Doom)
Stanley Kubrick
Terry Southern

Directed by: Stanley Kubrick

Release Date:
Theatrical: January 29, 1964
DVD: November 2, 2004

Running Time: 93 minutes, B/W

Origin: USA

Summary

RATING: PG

Starring Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens, Peter Bull, James Earl Jones, and Tracy Reed

Through a series of military and political accidents, a psychotic general - U.S. Air Force Commander Jack D. Ripper (Hayden) - triggers an ingenious, irrevocable scheme to attack Russia's strategic targets with nuclear bombs. The U.S. President (Sellers) and Dr. Strangelove (Sellers), a wheelchair-bound nuclear scientist who has bizarre ideas about man's future, work with the Soviet premier in a desperate effort to save the world.

Also On Metacritic

FILM: 2001: A Space Odyssey A Clockwork Orange Eyes Wide Shut Full Metal Jacket The Shining

Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 9.2 (out of 10) based on 98 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

David S. gave it a10:
Dr Strangelove is the comedy version of the movie Failsafe,where a Churchillian typeNeoconservative advisor to the Defense Department(sound familer?)played by Walter Matthue advises an all out attack on the Soviet Union,when a B-52 mistakenly crosses into Russian airspace during a war game.Kuburick refreshingly does do the left-right cliches in Strangelove.The Red menace was rattling sabers all over the globe in that period,from erecting the Berlin Wall,Cuba,SothEast Asia.The famous German scientists-Von Braun,Dornberger,Oberth,Rudolf were always in the headlies while they ran NASA.We see the British officer protrayed hilariously by Sellersas well.The President is the personification of Adlai Stevenson.All of this makes the film both topical,and timeless.

Marcel C gave it a10:
I would give it a 9.5, Dr. Strangelove should have appeared more in the movie. The acting is also awesome and the film have the black comedy, satirical and sometimes nonsense touch which is so difficult to find well placed in a movie nowadays.

Joe Bob gave it a10:
This was a great movie. Don't listen to lee b. werner von brauhn might have been german, but he was a great man, and led our country into the future of space exploration.

Coco Bunny gave it a10:
A satirical masterpiece.

Martin L gave it a10:
Peter Sellers gave a great performance in all the roles he played in this movie, but George C. Scott stole the show. This movie is a great glimpse into the paranoia of the Cold War. It is an example of how powerful a comedy can be If done right.

lee b gave it a10:
Without a doubt *the* greatest satiric screenplay of the 20th Century, only less dark than the far more disturbing and blacker comedy of Silence of the Lambs. To understand Dr. Strangelove you have to understand a Cold War era when the likelihood of nuclear holocaust seemed imminent and anti-Communist paranoia was still running very high. You think Sarah Palin is bad? The script savagely lampoons the real post-McCarthy wing-nuttery of the age, from anti-fluoridation reactionary groups like the John Birch Society to real nuclear war advocates speaking flippantly of maximum body counts during a full-scale nuclear war. The script roasts them all and takes a good wide swing at a few other soft spots in American society -- the use of Nazi scientists (we got to the moon on the shoulders of non other than Verner von Braun's leadership), the anti-commie paranoia that bordered on psychosis (the McCarthy era was pretty bad), the euphemistic "Peace is Our Profession" whitewash of the DOD (which led us to millions of deaths in S.E. Asia) and so on. Strangelove takes it to the logical extreme in a sarcastic - even jugular - vein, demonstrating the inanity of anti-fluoridation paranoia via a psychotic general admitting his withholding ejaculation in defense of his precious bodily fluids. This is examined in relation to fluoridation and the various epigrammatic phrases peace on earth, preserve our essences and purity of essence also revealing to us the acronymic three-letter cipher prefix necessary to cancel the attack.

James M. gave it a10:
A powerful message to mankind in any era.

Read more user comments >