As much as I think that one level of hell is watching Kevin Kostner act, particularly while trying to do an accent, I still highly enjoyed this movie that re-tells the behind the scenes real life drama of so-called Cuban Missle Crisis.
The two actors who portray the Kennedy Brothers make them come alive as real people, rather than icons. Based on the numerous memoirs and the secret Kennedy audio recordings, the story of what happened when US and Soviet Union nearly went to war is chilling because there was no genious to this, just luck and the good fortune that the two governments were both afraid of a nuclear war.
Kennedy refers to reading Barbara Tuchman's book, The Guns of August, about the beginning of WWI, and how the great European powers drifted into such a mess. That and the Bay of Pigs provided some warning to him, but as depicted in the movie, Kennedy also doesn't know what to do, and his character at moments has a hard time breathing as he processes the information.
This movie is probably not as interesting to people who can't remember the fears and the schoolhouse nuclear bomb drills of the time, but I found the movie quite compelling as history.
