Sometimes movies — novels, even — can address larger cultural and political issues that have been forgotten about on the Opinion pages. Or on talk radio, “Meet the Press,” in academic discourse.

We move on to hotter, seemingly more immediate topics even if the previous ones have not been solved. To have a limited attention span is only human, even in the face of imminent disaster.

I’m sure there are people who have been able to keep up the existential worry about nuclear war between the superpowers — or involving non-superpowers such as North Korea and Israel — all these many decades since the H-bomb made prospects even worse than the A-bomb did. Since “Dr. Strangelove” caused us to laugh while we whistled past the graveyard. Since Jonathan Schell’s “The Fate of the Earth,” with its war

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