Thats a big bomb...

With the impending release of Oppenheimer, we wanted to take a chance to discuss the best films to feature massive explosions in spectacular fashion (not to be confused with our Box Office Bombs Week).

Author

Tyler Clark
July 18, 2023

Good morning Consumers. Good morning Consumers. This is please consume, film newsletter that loves movies more than Chris Nolan loves blowing sh!t up.

Dr Strangelove (1964)

With the impending release of Oppenheimer, we wanted to take a chance to discuss the best films to feature massive explosions in spectacular fashion (not to be confused with our Box Office Bombs Week).

And what better way than with the granddaddy of them all.

Dr. Stanley

It is shocking for many to discover that this was directed by Stanley Kubrick, because we don’t really think of Kubrick as a guy that makes funny movies. This cultural attitude towards Kubrick is actually quite odd, because if you watch any of his movies, he has great sense of on screen humor.

If you watch The Shining, you’ll notice it’s kind of goofy. And we don’t mean that it in a “aged in a weird way” kinda way. No, that movie is just funny. The guy dressed as a dog giving a BJ, an ending that essentially feels like a troll, and Nicholson’s performance damn near farcical in its approach all point to the fact that Kubrick had more than fright on his mind while making the movie.

Or look at Barry Lyndon. On its surface it seems like a dower drama about some old shit nobody cares about, but in actuality it’s a riot, making fun of how dumb people around the French Revolution were and mocks vanity at every turn.

And then there’s today's film which feels straight up like Looney Tunes. It takes a hard subject like the Cold War and nihilistically looks at the whole military industrial complex that in a way that still feels relevant to this day.

Or how I learned to Stop Adapting

What’s so odd about the comedy of Dr. Strangelove is that it’s based on an entirely po-faced novel called Red Alert. When adapting it, Kubrick wanted to keep the dower nature of the book but kept coming up with ridiculous ideas that he thought people would find funny.

For a long time he would push those aside and keep working though it but kept coming back to the funnier ideas saying “It occurred to me that I was approaching the project in the wrong way. The only way to tell the story was as a black comedy or, better, a nightmare comedy, where the things you laugh at most are really the heart of the paradoxical postures that make a nuclear war possible.”

And that’s exactly what he did, from the ending (which we’ll get to in a second), the sucker-esque prop work like the tiny bible, lines like “gentlemen you can’t fight in here, this is the war room”, to bringing on ole Peter Sellers in a three role performance.

And Love the Ending

As funny as the movie is, its ending is so searing and honestly kind of a relief based on what we could have gotten. The ending we get is about as depraved of a sense of humor 1960’s America could muster up. Kubrick had a Nazi become giddy at the idea of what comes after the explosion and then played imagery of nuclear explosions set to “We’ll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn.

However, it was originally supposed to end with all the leaders stuck in the war room getting angry at each other and having a pie fight.

Kubrick found it to be too silly and cut the scene, never even letting the footage see the light of day, although there are some stills floating around the internet. And to be honest we’re kind of glad that’s the decision Kubrick made. The ending is made so much more poignant and sobering because of the comic elements that came before. Kubrick made the crowd laugh then left them feeling horrible and hopeless. Just how he liked it.

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