Losing ‘Control’ of nuclear weapons
If you only knew how close we have come to nuclear armageddon, not because of some known or unknown enemy, but because of our own nuclear weapons, you’d support nuclear disarmament, right? Maybe not. Still, the story told by the barely nonfiction film “Command and Control” is a daunting one, if also a bit foggy given the amount of fiction filmmaking techniques used.
In Damascus, Ark., just outside of Little Rock, in 1980, a butter-fingered missile maintenance specialist dropped an 8-pound socket down the side of a Titan II missile, something we see re-enacted several times, puncturing the missile’s fuel tank, releasing a deadly, volatile vapor and almost wiping out a large chunk of the United States. If the warhead atop the missile had gone off, the explosion would have been 600 times more powerful than the one that hit Hiroshima. Scared yet? Directed and co-written by Robert Kenner, whose previous efforts “Food, Inc.” and “Merchants of Doubt” also left me cold, and produced and based on the book by Eric Schlosser, who also appears in the film, “Command and Control” is an example of contemporary cautionary, if not alarmist, documentary filmmaking. Complete with a spooky score by Mark Adler, special effects and realistic, if also annoying, shaky-cam re-enactments that blur the line between real and fake, along with talking head interviews, voice-overs, still photos and archival footage, “Command and Control” comes this close to being an actual fiction film. Director Kenner gets arguably too much mileage out of staged or stock footage explosions. This, for me, is a problem.
While it is fascinating to hear former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown explain that the almost obsolete Titan II missiles were only kept around to serve as a bargaining chip in nuclear disarmament negotiations with the former Soviet Union, “Command and Control” is also repetitive and a bit too fond of the cliches favored by its interviewees. “Wee hours of the morning,” indeed. As frightening as the film’s conclusions are (“It will happen,” observes one expert), its techniques can be dubious.