This Danish-made film – half documentary, half reconstruction – tells the extraordinary story of Stanislav Petrov, once a colonel in the Soviet army who averted the third world war in 1983. As commanding officer at a nuclear weapons station, it was his decision whether or not to launch a retaliatory strike when Russian computers erroneously detected incoming American missiles, but he trusted his gut and didn’t give the command. As Russian actors play out the events and the tragic story of what happened next to Petrov, the film-makers follow the real Petrov, now a crotchety alcoholic haunted by the past, as he visits the US with his young translator in tow. Sergey Shnyryov is superb as Petrov’s fictional counterpart, and the present and the past are smoothly sutured together by deft editing and an insistently mournful string score, although it’s sometimes a bit repetitive. A surreal highlight shows Petrov meeting his idol, Kevin Costner.
