Among the DC and Marvel movies that have hogged much of the attention in theaters this year, “Supergirl” and “Spider-Man” among them, my favorite superhero movie has flown under the radar. Filmmaker Michael Russell Gunn’s “The Brink of War” contains no galactic skirmishes or city-leveling explosions. Instead, it takes us back to 1986, when the global nuclear stockpile had reached its Cold War peak, and reminds us how the fortitude and resolve of President Ronald Reagan helped bring one of history’s most oppressive empires closer to collapse.
Jeff Daniels portrays Reagan, capturing much of the Gipper’s mannerisms and genial, folksy candor, though I still preferred Dennis Quaid’s more physically intuitive performance in the 2024 biopic (or “origin story,” in superhero parlance) “Reagan.” The film opens with Reagan arriving in Iceland for the famed Reykjavík Summit with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev (Jared Harris), where the two intend to negotiate arms control. Reagan himself is reluctant to call it a summit. “Summits have gotten us nowhere,” he says. “Let’s just call it a meeting.”
The stakes hardly need embellishment. By 1986, the world contained nearly 70,000 nuclear warheads, overwhelmingly American and Soviet, with both superpowers restrained by the ghastly game theory of mutually assured destruction. Neither leader, socialist or otherwise, had any desire to preside over the annihilation of his country.
Most of “The Brink of War” unfolds inside Hofdi House, the actual site of the negotiations, where Gunn was even able to film using the chairs in which Reagan and Gorbachev sat. The claustrophobic setting suits a movie in which civilization’s fate turns on two men refusing to budge across a small table.
Harris, complete with Gorbachev’s signature forehead birthmark, wisely stops short of attempting a full Russian accent — one dialect American actors almost never get right — instead folding Slavic affectations and rolled Rs into his English. “Are we not mutually assured partners in destruction?” Gorbachev asks. “Should we not be mutually assured partners in reduction?”
Yet Reagan’s concern extends beyond quibbling over how many warheads should remain stationed across Europe. Gunn treats the summit as a collision between two political systems. Referencing the Second World War, Reagan tells his colleagues that “any system, no matter communist or fascist, that denies people their God-given free will is a threat to all nations.”
“The Brink of War” succeeds as a political thriller because it takes that moral distinction seriously.
Gunn also finds simple visual ways to enliven what is essentially two hours of men negotiating. Reagan and Gorbachev, seated across from one another, are at points framed inside isolated black spaces that create a visual wall between them. Elsewhere, the film cuts to the aides, intelligence officers, journalists, and spouses orbiting the negotiations.
Raisa Gorbacheva (Branka Katić), dressed head-to-toe in sumptuous sable furs, bristles when a New York Times reporter addresses her as the Soviet first lady. “In the Soviet Union, we are all truly equal,” she replies.
Such jabs at communism are abundant. When a Soviet official asks Secretary of State George Shultz (J.K. Simmons) why Americans call the president’s emergency satchel a “nuclear football,” suggesting such euphemisms signal weakness, Shultz shoots back: “Yes, gulag sounds so much nicer than inhumane Siberian torture prison.”
The screenplay occasionally feels inspired by contemporary politics. One Soviet dismisses Thomas Jefferson as a “slaveholder” and “conveniently capitalist,” while Gorbachev calls Jesus “the first socialist,” sounding more like Columbia freshmen than Cold War-era Kremlin hardliners. Still, it produces an amusing question. How can affluent Western college students fantasize about an economic system whose leader, in the film, admits that the Soviet Union cannot even manufacture milking machines and functioning tractors to feed its people?
Watching Reagan refuse to abandon the Strategic Defense Initiative, the missile-defense program nicknamed “Star Wars,” also made me pine for some of his uncompromising spirit in America’s dealings with Iran. One struggles to imagine Reagan tweeting that “A CIVILIZATION WILL DIE TONIGHT,” only to announce shortly afterward that military action has been postponed for two weeks.
Reagan and Gorbachev ultimately leave Reykjavík without what negotiators call a zone of possible agreement, or ZOPA, largely because Gorbachev insists that Strategic Defense Initiative research be confined to the laboratory. Yet Reykjavík was hardly a failure. The negotiations helped clear the path toward the 1987 INF Treaty and proved that sweeping arms reductions were possible.
That is also where “The Brink of War” finds its point. Reagan understood that negotiation did not require moral equivalence and that peace was worth pursuing without pretending the systems on either side of the table were interchangeable. Driven by strong performances from Daniels and Harris, the film may lack the CGI thrills of this year’s superhero blockbusters, but it portrays a hero who actually had a hand in saving the world from nuclear annihilation and communism.
***
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.
This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
.png)
.png)
