The “insane movie” Steven Spielberg called the second coming of ‘Dr Strangelove’
It’s no secret that Steven Spielberg has always idolised Stanley Kubrick, which means it takes a pretty special movie for the former to invoke the latter’s name as a point of comparison.
Even though their directorial styles couldn’t be more different, with Spielberg as tied to sentimentality as Kubrick is to emotional distance, there’s barely a filmmaker in the business dating back half a century who hasn’t sung the praises of the inimitable 2001: A Space Odyssey maestro at least once.
They even became friends, or as close to friends as the notoriously shy and retiring Kubrick made within the industry. The high-powered pair would share lengthy phone calls, which sounded awfully one-sided based on Spielberg’s recollections, but he didn’t care when one of his biggest inspirations was on the other end of the line, picking his brains.
When Kubrick decided that he wasn’t going to make A.I. Artificial Intelligence, there was only one person he trusted to take over the production, even if it did culminate in Spielberg defending himself from accusations that he’d ruined the iconic auteur’s vision, which he was at pains to explain wasn’t the case.
Plenty of behind-the-camera talents have been dubbed ‘Kubrickian’ over the years, but Paul Thomas Anderson isn’t one of them. He’s got his own set of stylistic tricks, techniques, and foibles, but One Battle After Another convinced Spielberg that Kubrick’s seminal farce, Dr Strangelove, had finally found a worthy heir.
“I have not seen a movie that is so tonally relative to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove,” he told Anderson during a post-One Battle After Another Q&A, per The Film Stage. “This brings a kind of absurdist comedy, taken very seriously, because it’s so much a reflection of what’s happening today, every day, throughout this country. But it takes it to a point where you want to laugh, because if you don’t laugh, you’re going to start screaming.”
While there are certain spiritual and thematic similarities between Anderson’s latest and Kubrick’s masterpiece, they’re hardly two peas in a pod. Still, furthering his comparison, Spielberg outlined how “Kubrick used armageddon as a way to tell his story, to make his statement,” with One Battle After Another bringing audiences “on the same edge of that kind of absurdist feeling.”
The only director to helm the highest-grossing movie of all time on three separate occasions said that Dr Strangelove makes him “nervously laugh all the way through,” whereas One Battle After Another “more than nervously, [I] had a great time laughing all the way through this.” Coming from one of cinema’s most famous Kubrick superfans, praise doesn’t come much higher, especially from someone of Spielberg’s standing.
Both pictures blend social satire and broader comedy with an underlying sentiments that reflect the world we live in, and with One Battle Another on the receiving end of stellar reviews, it would make an interesting double-feature were it paired with Dr Strangelove, even if, superficially, Anderson’s revolutionary caper and Kubrick’s monochromatic slice of magic are more apples and oranges than kindred spirits.
