Great attempt. Great cast and while some performances are stilted, I see that as deliberate not bad acting. The split screen is affected, not dated and works. It's trying to be a paranoia thriller.
But, least to worst bad: Too thrilled with technology. I like me a procedural but this spent time focusing on pushing buttons on speakerphones. And everything. So slow. And lots that is clearly Mission Impossible fakery. Poison and explosives in the cabinets? Or just dumb. The missile is visible through an Open Door?
They read the MacGuffin out loud! There's a lovely sequence where they are talking around it, and you are happy. Ah, they know that it doesn't matter and just needs to be "we could never reveal this to the American people" but 20 minutes later there's a long sequence where they read passages from it and debate it. Brings the film to a halt, and also makes it easy to poke holes in the logic; too many anti-communists still, it would have been not that bad, not that surprising if true and revealed. Fail.
The entire plot is nonsense. Even when I first saw it as a12 year old I knew - as many kids did at the time - that ICBMs and NASA rockets overlap a lot and are hilariously fragile. If you can't just park trucks on the doors to keep them from opening, you can wait till they are opened and throw bricks at the rocket then run away when it starts leaking. Safer is likely to be off in the treeline and when they launch (the missiles sticking up is very dated) are going slow, just poke holes in them. None will launch. It would be a mess but there's no risk they go flying towards the Soviets.
But, least to worst bad: Too thrilled with technology. I like me a procedural but this spent time focusing on pushing buttons on speakerphones. And everything. So slow. And lots that is clearly Mission Impossible fakery. Poison and explosives in the cabinets? Or just dumb. The missile is visible through an Open Door?
They read the MacGuffin out loud! There's a lovely sequence where they are talking around it, and you are happy. Ah, they know that it doesn't matter and just needs to be "we could never reveal this to the American people" but 20 minutes later there's a long sequence where they read passages from it and debate it. Brings the film to a halt, and also makes it easy to poke holes in the logic; too many anti-communists still, it would have been not that bad, not that surprising if true and revealed. Fail.
The entire plot is nonsense. Even when I first saw it as a12 year old I knew - as many kids did at the time - that ICBMs and NASA rockets overlap a lot and are hilariously fragile. If you can't just park trucks on the doors to keep them from opening, you can wait till they are opened and throw bricks at the rocket then run away when it starts leaking. Safer is likely to be off in the treeline and when they launch (the missiles sticking up is very dated) are going slow, just poke holes in them. None will launch. It would be a mess but there's no risk they go flying towards the Soviets.