Movie Review

Pop quiz, hotshot.	1
The most hissable villain in Roger Donaldson's Thirteen Days, the first major Hollywood film about the Cuban missile crisis, is:	2
1) an aggressive Soviet Union bent on world domination	3
2) the cynical dictator Fidel Castro, betraying a revolution and recklessly destabilizing the Western Hemisphere	4
3) a naïve cadre of American peaceniks who favor a policy of appeasement in dealing with totalitarian evil	5
4) the warmongering generals on the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, heedlessly steering the planet toward nuclear oblivion.	6
The student of American cinema who needs an answer sheet to that question should be assigned repeat viewings of Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and A Few Good Men (1992). Since M*A*S*H (1970), the main currents of Hollywood thought have been reliably antimilitary, with men in uniform—especially officers above the rank of major—serving pretty much the way a desperado in a black hat and handlebar moustache did in the silent era. Little wonder that the thirteen days that brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear war in October 1962 should be depicted less as a master class in high-wire geopolitics than as a treatise on how noble civilian leadership frustrates bloodthirsty military commanders hell-bent on nuking 'em—and us—back to the stone age.	7
Stylistically reminiscent of vintage Cold War thrillers such as Seven Days in May (1964) and Fail Safe (1964), Thirteen Days comes packaged with the usual wrappings of high-seriousness Hollywood nuclear brinkmanship. As such, the film invites appreciation or derision from three not mutually exclusive perspectives: for its fidelities or departures from the known historical record; for its atmospheric evocation of a broader Cold War Zeitgeist; and for its popcorn satisfactions as a suspense film inspired, as the tagline goes, by actual events. (Though the Cuban missile crisis has been the subject of myriad scholarly studies and memoirs and the well-regarded 1974 ABC television movie The Missiles of October, the rich dramatic material has caught Hollywood's attention only once before, in Joe Dante's underrated 1991 Matinee, a dark comedy about a William Castle–like horror film impresario ballyhooing his latest shlockfest against the backdrop of the real horror show premiering ninety miles offshore.)	. . .