The other day Vince and I were making S’mores and chatting about life, when he pointed out that 2011 was the 20th anniversary of the end of the Cold War, that era in world history when everyone lived in pants-crapping fear that the U.S. and Russia were going to destroy us all. More importantly than global genocide and the threat of a nuclear holocaust, the Cold War had an undeniable impact on the movie industry, most notably in creating one of the easiest and most overused plot devices of the last 50 years.
Obviously, the Cold War gave us classics like Dr. Strangelove, The Manchurian Candidate, and the entire James Bond franchise. It also gave us The Hunt for Red October and Tom Clancy’s career, as well as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and wherever else Shia LeBeouf and his grandfather Harrison Ford take us. It gave us The Manhattan Project, The Good Shepherd, Thirteen Days, Top Gun, Good Night, and Good Luck, and even Salt, which was a modern reminder of just how hilariously off-the-wall – and flat out terrible – some Cold War films were.
In fact, those are the films that I want to celebrate – the movies that both embraced the terrifying nightmare of global war and laughed in the face of four decades of silent terror. Because without them, we’d probably all be living in mountain bunkers or adapting to our tentacles.
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