Twenty years ago, the brilliant documentarian Errol Morris gave us The Fog of War, his feature-length portrait of and in-depth interview with Robert McNamara, who served as US Secretary of Defense for most of the 1960s. The film won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 2004, and today it’s an excellent companion piece to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, not least because McNamara was intimately involved in the political behind-the-scenes of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the escalation of the Vietnam War. He offers stunning and sometimes terrifying insight into the nuclear brinkmanship of the Cold War that Oppenheimer’s development of the atomic bomb launched. The issues of human nature, learning from history (or not), and the ethics of warfare remain, of course, startlingly relevant. (Read my 2003 review.)
US: rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
UK: rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
See The Fog of War at Letterboxd for more viewing options.
