Everything about this is wrong.
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Fail-Safe
syncopatedrhythm — 14 years ago(December 31, 2011 06:44 PM)
This is probably the worst movie ever made. Technically it is so wrong it is laughable. Where to start, fighter interceptors do not have one tenth of the range shown, especially with burners lit. The whole launching decoy planes and calibrated missles, bombers that launch air to air missles straight upuggghhhh. Even now 50 years later we don't have the technology to watch a whole air battle over Russia unfold on a display. What the hell was looking at this a super spy satellite. The president tells the guy in Moscow the sound you will hear is the phone melting..i'm sure if a nuke goes off over a city you would never know it and be vaporized instantly.
This whole movie plays out like a bad high school stage production, stupid effects and lots of talk. -
generalusgrant — 14 years ago(December 31, 2011 06:49 PM)
If you think this is the "worst movie ever made" your experience in watching film in severely limited.
If you want a masterpiece, watch Dr. Strangelove. This is not up to that class, but nothing is. Fail-Safe is still an exceptional movie despite some glaring weaknesses. Fritz Weaver going nuts is chief among those dreadful moments.
If you can't even marvel at Fonda's near-perfect performance, then I can only reiterate that you have apparently only watched a dozen or so movies in your life. -
oephellia — 14 years ago(December 31, 2011 08:05 PM)
I don't know how old you are but you have to put this movie into the context of when it was filmed around 1963/4. Ordinary people didn't even know what a computer was let alone whether or not a fighter jet could fly those distances or what technologies were available at the time. No one questioned much back then.
I believe it was meant to bring home a point about nuclear weapons and what would happen if something with the MACHINE went wrong.
That's it. No more. No less.
It was what it was. -
syncopatedrhythm — 14 years ago(January 08, 2012 03:55 PM)
It might have been entertaining in the 60's, but 50 years later it is a joke. Just so far fetched even for today's technology. They could have made a better more believable movie, hell Strangelove is a satire but it is more realistic. I still stand by saying it is one of the worst movies ever. Plan 9 from outer space is more believable.
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Alek_Hidell — 14 years ago(January 30, 2012 01:47 PM)
I don't know where you get the idea that we didn't have the technology back then. I've worked in the defense industry since the 70's, and we already had that stuff (the big board) before I started. It's called radar triangulation. I used to work for one of the companies that supplied such technology (and other stuff you've never even heard of) and has for decades.
EDIT: Check out the SAGE computer which the US used from the 50's until the 80's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi_Automatic_Ground_Environment
As for being realistic or not, why not just look at the writing and the message of the movie instead of blasting it because "the fighter's canopy has 67 rivets and not the 70 it showed in the movie" kind of criticism. You might want to do some reading up on what the situation was back when the movie was made too. Back in the early 60's, we fully expected to be blown into oblivion at any time. Much different than today.
I'm just a patsy! -
oldsalt61 — 14 years ago(March 08, 2012 07:54 PM)
Good points about the general public not getting as much information back then either. This was at the height of the Cold War and only a couple of years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Given the fear of the times, and the misinformation stuff used, the film might very well have intentionally shown our bombers and fighters having exaggerated abilities to try to fool the Russians.
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DD-931 — 13 years ago(April 10, 2012 05:29 PM)
People watching this movie in the 21st century tend to forget that this movie was extrapolating technical aspects of the cold war into a future scenario. This movie was meant to be speculative, not a documentary of the Cold War circa 1963/1964. Probably the idea was that the events of this movie were happening more around 1970 or so. And in 1963 (when the movie was actually made) no one knew exactly where we'd be technologically speaking in 1970. They could only guess.
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syncopatedrhythm — 9 years ago(September 11, 2016 03:05 PM)
How do you know what I have heard of or know? I was in the Airforce for 32 years, joined in 82. Aviation technician. Sorry still stand by my original assesment, in 63 there was no way to track a bomber acoss the Soviet Union.
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PhillipNoir — 13 years ago(June 07, 2012 10:15 AM)
It is distracting to see technical inaccuracies especially for an audience used to Desert Storm realism. The scene that always makes me laugh is the video clip of Delta Dart fighters, after being ordered to catch the bombers by going into after-burners fire their missles. Perhaps it was difficult for the production staff to acquire military stock footage in the 1962 Cold War environment?
This film is not a Military Channel documentary but rather, a drama that illustrates the brutally cold reality of our government's policy of Mutually Assured Destruction. Perhaps it is easier for those of us who lived through this era to understand the palpable tension that came from growing up during the Cold War, in contrast to the national security theater of today's War on Terrorism, it's color coded alert schedule (still orange after all these years), and our business as usual attitude to the 9/11 tragedies.
In the early 1960s, many of today's "seniors" can recall neighbors building back-yard bomb shelters or receiving Civil Defense training in the Boy Scouts. Planning for the end of the world provided surreal start to the 1960s and this film is a response to the very real terror of the widespread human annihilation threatened by what was known as World War Three, and it stands as a left-brained bookend to the right-brained perspective of Stanley Kubrick's comic masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. -
Ulex — 13 years ago(June 11, 2012 08:11 PM)
It is distracting to see technical inaccuracies especially for an audience used to Desert Storm realism. The scene that always makes me laugh is the video clip of Delta Dart fighters, after being ordered to catch the bombers by going into after-burners fire their missles. Perhaps it was difficult for the production staff to acquire military stock footage in the 1962 Cold War environment?
I have no idea what you're talking about. They're the wrong planes? They're doing things that are unrealistic?
Maybe for me ignorance is bliss. -
jetlag31 — 13 years ago(January 29, 2013 08:25 AM)
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I suggest you watch the featurette on the Fail-Safe DVD before bitching about technical inaccuracies. Given that the filmmakers could not ANY cooperation from the US government in making the film "technical inaccuracies" were only to be expected. (Lumet's commentary on the DVD also has some remarks relevant to this.) In contrast, Dr Strangelove was showered with cooperation.
<Apparently, yes! Those shots in the film of the bombers taking off is actually a single bootlegged clip of the SAME plane because the Fail-Safe filmmakers could not get ANY footage whatsoever from the rental houses which handle such things.
You should be grateful the film got made at all! -
nitrateprint — 12 years ago(June 20, 2013 05:47 PM)
Dr Strangelove was showered with cooperation.
[Citation Needed]
http://books.google.com/books?id=uHNvAeD4yR4C&pg=PA150&lpg=PA1 50#v=onepage&q&f=false
It's not surprising that the United States Air Force refused to offer Kubrick military cooperation, the result being that the entire film was completed in England.
http://kubrickfilms.warnerbros.com/common/Kubrick_101.html
Since the U.S. Air Force would not cooperate with a comedy film about nuclear war, Adam faithfully re-created the interior of a B-52 bomber using drawings and photos he found in various flying and science magazines. -
aa56 — 12 years ago(August 11, 2013 09:53 PM)
I wouldn't say everything, but this film is stock-footage hell and production incompetency. Just read the very long Goofs section. I'd have expected Roger Corman or Ed Wood, Jr. to have made this film.
Like,
, did the Air Force threaten to sue if a Hustler bomber was called by its real name, so the producers had to use a WWII name?
It's a riveting story, but I give it a 5 based on
production quality.