Doomsday Gun

I found this to be very interesting. It was straight Forward and nothing added or omitted made it even better. The acting was good and the story made you wonder: would you do the same thing? After watching this, I was reminded that so many of the nations that hate us, we have helped create. As it said at the end "It is estimated that almost $3 million dollars of taxpayer money was sent to Iraq to arm them". The United States creates these monsters and then ends up having to face them. We did the same thing in Afghanstan in the name of National Pride. By arming the rebels who eventually became the Taliban, It became the mistake that came back and bite us on the ass. Now our Troops are paying for it. I really liked this movie.

One reviewer claimed that the idea of a Supergun was impractical due to the huge flame that could easily be observed from satellites, and that such a gun would take days to clean out and reload.

This is not correct.

A supergun can work, and is no more impractical than a fixed airbase or missile launch site.

The German superguns did work, and many rounds were fired both in testing and operationally - at Luxembourg.

Iran would have had difficulty destroying a firing site. Its ground attack capability was not good, and the gun itself would be a small target. Flames could not be seen from space, even if Iran did have a satellite over Iraq at the time of firing.

It would also have been an ideal weapon with which to launch projectiles against the state of Israel.

Just a quibble to correct Jonathan from Hoboken's identification of Gerry Bull as an America. He was Canadian (you can even see him brandishing his Canadian passport in the final airport scene with Price (Spacey) near the end.) Gerry Bull was an inconvenient Canadian, in that he thought too big for a Canadian, and, like many other Canadians of talent and vision, eventually had to leave the country to achieve what he wanted. He was a brilliant supersonic aerodynamics engineer, who had contributed to the Avro Arrow program, and had run HARP (High Altitude Research Program) which had been, ahem, aimed at achieving spaceflight using guns, a la Jules Verne. It had operated the original 'supergun' in the Caribbean, with battleship guns put end to end. Bull gave up on Canada when Canada gave up on him, and that's when he became the international long-range artillery guy, selling his expertise to whoever paid - Israel, South Africa, Iraq. I figure if Israel could knock out Saddam's Osirak nuclear plant with an air strike, it wouldn't be past them to knock off the guy about to give Saddam a supergun with which to shell Tel Aviv.

The movie, though heavy on the CIA-is-the-root-of-all-evil conspiracy theories, was entertaining and not that bad, especially as a made-for-TV job, with, I thought, pretty good casting (I always like Michael Kitchen).

Another good example of how a tv movie can, perhaps within bland and low-cost production values, be more interesting and truthful than the standard Hollywood film.

Another respondent has described how well the film captures the creative moment within engineering, and that's all true. I think Langella's performance was also an excellent representation of a buccaneering businessman, drawing about him intelligent people he trusts and inspiring them, although occasionally haranguing them.

Good scenes .. Gerald Bull dining on the grave of a famous German artilleryman. The Israeli spy chief walking morosely around the Baghdad arms fair looking at all the hardware he would one day have to face. The nods and winks of the British establishment as they turn a blind eye to the production of Saddam's supergun.

Yes it clunks here and there. But fine acting and a literate script. More absorbing than most films which cost 10 times as much.

Seven out of ten.

This movie sets out to tell the (more or less) true story of Canadian weapons designer Gerald Bull (Frank Langella), who dreams of building the world's most powerful artillery gun: hundreds of feet long and able to deliver a shell the size of a small building. The only problem? America and Great Britain don't want to finance his masterpiece and don't want Bull constructing one for anybody else. But Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is willing to pay for one, and able to get around the American embargo on selling weapons to Iraq by cleverly disguising the gun's parts as ordinary industrial equipment. But once Bull goes to work for Saddam, he sets himself as a target for international hit squads willing to do anything to keep such a weapon out of the wrong hands. He found himself playing cat-and-mouse, taking precautions to stay one step ahead of the world's intelligence agencies. This movie provides a pretty good reconstruction of the project, and the fact that the project was a quite chilling possibility gives the story much of its interest. Unlike the outlandish schemes of James Bond's usual adversaries, Bull's supergun was technically feasible and his customer, Saddam, was a very real threat to world peace. A decent way to pass the time for anybody looking for real life intelligence intrigue.