Film

The Fog of War

Name: The Fog of War
Genre: Documentary, TV Movie
Released: 2003
Cast: Robert McNamara, Errol Morris, Fidel Castro, Barry Goldwater, John F. Kennedy

An 85-year-old Robert McNamara, architect of some of the century's worst decisions, sits for one long unflinching interview with Errol Morris and tries, honestly and unevenly, to explain himself. Archival footage and a Philip Glass score turn one old man's memory into a meditation on power, fallibility, and the terrifying ease of rationalizing catastrophe. Essential, not comfortable.

TMDb rating

7.7

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But If you want sober reflection, a farce about the end of the world might feel like the wrong tone entirely.

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Standard Operating Procedure2008

Morris turns his camera on the soldiers who ran Abu Ghraib, and the same questions about moral fog and rationalization resurface in a much darker register — decisions made by people, not policy.

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The Act of Killing2012

Perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide reenact their own killings for the camera, producing something even more unsettling than McNamara's confession — a study in how people narrate their own atrocities.

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A dramatized HBO account of LBJ's escalation of Vietnam, with McNamara himself a major character — it fills in scenes the documentary can only describe secondhand.

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The War Room1993

A much lighter companion — the Clinton campaign's backroom strategists caught on camera making high-stakes decisions in real time, and a reminder that 'war room' politics doesn't always cost lives.

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The trial of the Chicago Seven protesters, told through animation and archival footage, shows Vietnam's cost on the home front — the fury McNamara's war provoked in the streets he never really faced.

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Same director, same technique of watching a man wrestle with an unresolved past, but expanded into a hybrid dramatized format that tests how far that method can stretch.

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