As much a fixture of post-war American mythology as the atom bomb and the Edsel, the B-52 bomber has served as a symbol for everything good and bad about American society. To its defenders, the plane is a cherished, irreplaceable combat-ready veteran that represents the triumph of might and ingenuity over the country's ideological and political enemies. To others, the plane is a huge, lumbering, unreliable dinosaur that symbolizes American hypocrisy and wastefulness, a piece of Cold War machinery that promises peace but leaves death and destruction in its wake. The new documentary B-52 opens with a straightforward sequence explaining the inner workings of the famous plane, but it doesn't take long for director Hartmut Bitomsky to make abundantly clear which side of the ideological divide he falls on. Early in B-52, the director interviews a painter of fighter planes whose work resembles military porn, particularly a painting in which American fighter planes from different historical periods hover together like a swarm of Cronenbergian metal phalluses. In the same interview, the painter defends the B-52 as a "weapon of peace," and much of the film's remainder feels like a lengthy argument against that assertion. Chronicling the plane's mishap-laden history with a Kubrickian sense of clinical detachment, B-52 documents just how close the plane has come to causing a series of catastrophic events. Combining dry, frequently tedious interviews of military folk and aviation experts with footage of the plane in all its shiny metallic glory, B-52 is narrated by a pair of voices—one male, one female—who provide ideologically loaded narration in a monotone that reeks of pretension. B-52's smug, ham-fisted pacifism provides an antidote to the fevered war-mongering that's swept the country in the past few months, but this is one instance in which the cure is nearly as bad as the disease.