Pretty Good

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Unlike most other documentary interviews I've seen, I found this interesting and even satisfying to watch. However, after reading what Wikipedia has to say about the Vietnam War, and skimming the six pages of McNamara's obituary in the NY Times, I can't say I'm greatly the wiser about what McNamara's personal responsibility might have been. Why was it called McNamara's War by Senator Morse ? It seems to me, whatever McNamara's role, that the buck stopped with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. It was America's war and the Presidents' war. McNamara must have done his best to serve them, and I can't see why he should bear the blame for what must be reckoned their policies. Did he hide the futility of the war from these presidents ? I'm thinking he deserves a medal for guts and stamina, fighting against the odds until his death at 93.

I can't remember when I last saw anything as chilling as this great documentary... maybe the original 1988 version of The Vanishing, which equally left one profoundly disturbed at how studied and artful yet gratuitous and without any ultimate meaning or purpose the genesis of certain evil is.The lifetime analytical/"intellectual" opus of McNamara, on behalf of the US government, as portrayed in the records shown on the Fog of War, is eerily reminiscent of those obsessive Nazi written orders and documents that we see in WW2 documentaries. Everything counted and tabulated, percentualised and extrapolated. Such infinite trouble and such enormous pains taken, such an exemplary work ethic shown, such savage analysis and documentation undertaken... and all for what, other than the pursuit of goals actually lying between pure amorality and utter immorality?It's understandable and thereby tolerable that one - nation state or individual - should fall into unforgivable amorality or immorality by default, by sloth, out of disorganisation, cluelessness or personal weakness. But to somehow achieve as output an utter darkness of spirit after such effort, study and personal severity is devastatingly eerie, perverse and perplexing.McNamara does have a momentary tear in his eye as he recounts his decades of power across several utterly brutal wars, and it is for Jack Kennedy and his final Arlington resting place. Ultimately, he can be summed up via the school-captain smirk he wears standing next to Kennedy as he announces his appointment as Secretary of State in 1961. Power for the sake of power, success for the sake of success, any claims made to morality and right as meaningless as they are irrelevant. The man a perfect reflection of his country post war. Macchiavelli would consider himself surpassed.These are conclusions that someone, ethically sensitive but not at all prejudiced here (indeed barely knowing anything about this man), can reach here just by viewing what is effectively a documentary self-portrait. Director Errol Morris' genius consists in having allowed McNamara to reveal himself so eerily and damningly even while being given free use of a stage to lay out a grand sophistry of reflections, rationalizations and truisms to justify or expiate his lifetime's work.Quite an unforgettable experience, and multiply so because so unexpectedly and improbably given the self-portrait format. Phillip Glass' own genius should be acknowledged, as well as Morris' brilliance in exploiting it in The Fog of War, with eerie minimalism the perfect soundtrack here as in The Thin Blue Line 15 years earlier.We may not quite have plumbed the depths of gut-emptying futility and Shakespearean despair with this documentary X-Ray of McNamara, but we are close. I can only think of Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle and a few of the latter's soul mates as subjects that could supply an even more devastating moral experience and take us to rock bottom itself.

This is an excellent, subdued interview with Robert Strange McNamara, who was US secretary of defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War. If you have any interest in and a bit of knowledge of recent US history, then this will be a pot of gold to you. It is packaged as a series of lessons (confusingly, ten "life lessons" and eleven "political lessons), which doesn't work so well, partially because they aren't catchy enough for a movie. I particularly found McNamara's personal account of his life before his political career very interesting.You don't have to be a history buff to profit from this movie, but be advised that you need to have at least a working knowledge of the Kennedy and Johnson years.

I saw this first in the theatres and meant to review it at the time but never did. I got another chance to see it the other night and was blown away again by the approach the film-maker, Errol Morris, takes in the making of this.They say that a life unexamined is not worth living and the subject of this documentary, Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, examines his life and his decisions under the unrelenting eye of the camera and admits to failures and misinterpreted intelligence and tells us what he could have done better and what we all should do when confronted with similar scenarios in the light of the history of both the Second World War and Vietnam.I had never known the extent of the firebombing of all the wooden cities of Japan - and this was before the nuclear devastation that was to befall them. Horrific. Innocent civilians, uncountable children, swept away in fear and pain.I had also never known how the perception of Vietnam by the U.S. was so very, very wrong. The motivations projected onto Vietnam by the U.S. were completely incorrect.Robert McNamara shines a new light on all of this with the benefit of hindsight and new intelligence and weeps with the rest of us. I could not help thinking of how one could live with the blood of so, so many on one's hands. How does one achieve peace?The eleven lessons, though trite at times, have never been brought to bear on the current conflict. But should be.9 out of 10. It should be shown in every school in the world.