Here’s another remake, or as industry folk like to call it these days, a “reimagining.” Sidney Lumet’s 1964 cold-war classic “Fail-Safe” will be remade by Joe Berlinger, the director known for the classic true-crime docuseries “Paradise Lost.”
Lumet’s film, one of his very best, and based on the novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, follows a tense and realistic scenario where a mechanical failure sends a group of U.S. bombers toward Moscow with nuclear weapons, and the U.S. government scrambling to prevent a nuclear apocalypse.
Today’s press release describe’s Berlinger’s take as a “faux-cinéma vérité approach” to “reimagine what the world would look like today had the events in the book really happened in 1967, with the total nuclear annihilation of New York and Moscow.” The film “will combine high-stakes international drama and classic documentary-style storytelling to reinvent the Cold War political thriller for new audiences.”
While we’re at it, and with “Fail-Safe” firmly planted on the list, here’s a shout out to Lumet, one of the greatest to ever do it, and still underrated to this day. Other films of his that belong in the cinematic time-capsule include “12 Angry Men,” “The Pawnbroker,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Serpico,” “The Verdict,” “Network,” “Prince of the City,” and “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.”