the German government's decision to install American Pershing II and Cruise missiles in 1982...Kluge again joined with several colleagues to make a third collective film charting the course of the demonstrations and exploring the implications of living on the edge of total annihilation. As in his other films, Kluge mixes cinematic modes to assemble an extraordinarily diverse, often incisive...sometimes maddeningly oblique range of perspectives on the issues. Schlöndorff contributes a sequence in which President Reagan and other Western leaders fly to Versailles for a summit meeting... No words are needed to underscore the disturbing point that such meetings are spectacles for public consumption, not occasions for serious deliberations. The inventor of the neutron bomb tells an interviewer that his children regard his invention "with tremendous indifference." Excerpts from a CBS documentary on Hattenbach, a small West German border town, which also happens to be ground zero in NATO's strategic planning, are accompanied by the Jello and beer commercials that lend a sense of normalcy to the lunatic prospect of nuclear war... Stuart Liebman