Reviews

This movie was a waste of some very talented people. I liked all of the actors but the people who wrote this movie knew nothing of ICBM security or launch protocols. Even when I was 16 it seemed to be full of holes.

First off, the missileers cannot launch missiles without a series of codes. These codes must be sent to the launch team before they can arm anything. NORAD controls that. If a missile crew got the wild idea to do an independent launch, the computers and arming systems would not work until the code was called in.

The Air Force does not have a bunch of armored vehicles ready to roll in (including the surplus USMC Ontose recoiless rifle carrier they painted blue and used).

The snipers had stock M-16s with screw-on scopes. Cheezy.

Even if you can overlook all of that by saying procedures had changed and gotten lax and we had decided to remove the external consent requirement to launch there are 2 BIG issues that were missed.

One: all the Air Force had to do was open fire on the missiles and they would have burned and probably blown up on the pads (without setting off the nukes, they have a VERY specific initiation process that is NOT triggered by heat). It is all NASA can do to keep rockets and missiles from blowing up on a perfect launch. In case you did not know, a missile is 90% pressurized fuel tank. poke a hole in it and it'll never fly, at least not far. Small arms fire could do it, but artillery or anti-tank missiles would be best.

Two: There is no way the president is ever going to be handed over as a hostage.

All of that is just technical trivia. The idea that America would enter a war and stay in it until we had lost 50,000 men just to show the evil commies we were serious is beyond absurd. To buy that requires just plain gullibility. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of American History knows that the war in Viet Nam lasted over 3 presidential administrations, yet the movie makes us believe that one decided to keep us in the until no less than 50,000 Americans died and so it became policy.

Nothing about this forgettable film is timeless or relevant. It is a piece of junk that preyed on cold war fears of nuclear missiles and government mistrust (which were very much in the public consciousness in post Viet Nam, Post Watergate America).

If you want to see Burt Lancaster and Charles Durning together in a much netter movie, see Tough Guys.

The fun in this movie is that they made an attempt to be somewhat realistic given the plot. The cold war tensions are not at all exaggerated, the ridicule the test pilot endures when he first reports the thing and the later loss of the P-51 is based on a real incident.

In, I believe it was 1947, a flight of military P-51s were inbound for landing {and low on fuel} when one was sent to investigate a UFO. the pilot climbed high and crashed. The military deemed hypoxia due to a malfunctioning O2 system and fuel starvation. In that case, the UFO was believed to one of the early "satellite balloons" the USAF was playing with. They were made to be shiny and glowed very bright in the evening sky.

It adds a little "credo" to the he movie when they use a real event to kick off the story even if a few characters and the Russian-American love story are a cliché