The Johnson Administration downplayed the significance of the landing, explaining that the marines were being deployed to secure an airbase used for Operation Rolling Thunder, a bombing campaign against North Vietnam.
Kathryn Bigelow has reopened the subject that we all tacitly agree not to discuss or imagine, in the movies or anywhere else: the subject of an actual nuclear strike. It's the subject which tests narrative forms and thinkability levels. Maybe this is why we prefer to see it as something for absurdism and satire a way of not staring into the sun to remember Kubrick's (brilliant) black comedy Dr Strangelove, with no fighting in the war room etc, rather than Lumet's deadly serious Fail Safe.
