A House of Dynamite - Scary if you don't know anything

Just finished Kathryn Bigelow's 2025 release of A House of Dynamite on Netflix. 

This is a good movie that effectively displays the systemic measures for defending the continental USA against nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles while highlighting the failures in this system and the ultimate moral judgements that are raised in considering retaliation. The film is done in a Rashomon style series of scenes on ellipses that are very evocative of Nolan's Dunkirk and Ridley Scott's The Last Duel, while ultimately chaining together into something very Bigelow.

It's shot with muscle in her very industrial lighting and military edge tone. The performances are excellent from Rebecca Ferguson to Idris Elba, a compelling performance Anthony Ramos and a standout Jack Ryan esque Gabriel Basso - but despite a legion of all star supporting cast, and the terse premise. I was ultimately left wanting. Still I don't think I should have gotten what I wanted, in the same way that I don't think we need to see the destruction of Hiroshima in Oppenheimer. This movie isn't exactly about the disaster of nuclear war; it's about how our insufficient abilities to communicate with each other might stop our prevention of it. That the film's imperative is to give every principle character a very human relationship and that anchor is the pressing fishhook in our cheek that makes us relate and care. It's fairly obviously deployed, but that is the crux of the movie. The people you love will die. It is a certainty.

This year I read Annie Jacobsen's book Nuclear War: A Scenario and it is a haunting a desolate portrayal of what would happen if nuclear war actually kicked off, as well as the disturbing history of how Western government viewed the use of these weapons, and it's presence is felt in this movie. After reading it I understand how fragile our stable daily existence is and how easily a chain reaction of decisions could send us back to the stone age, but worse. I also took note of how this film is relatively similar to the 2002 adaptation of Tom Clancy's novel The Sum of All Fears, but more artfully executed and no Affleck.

This is a “people being really good at their jobs and walking and talking” movie ALA Spotlight or Bigelow's own Zero Dark Thirty. Volker Bertelmann's (All Quiet on the Western Front) score is a haunting beauty and malice that reminds me of Sicaro. 

This isn't a movie about war, or politics, or faith or ideology. It's a movie about the power we hold to destroy ourselves at the urgency of decisions made without the right information under duress. The ticking clock is the enemy in this film. It's not who sent the nuke that that matters; but that there is not adequate time to react reasonably, or make an informed decision in the face of world altering consequences.  This is a movie about showing how individuals have been made to make decisions that are beyond one individual, or an concerted group's, ability to fully contend with. And one of the major conceits of this movie is that everyone involved is super capable. Which isn't something I'd call the current American administration. Blows me away that the US Government allowed this movie to release. But Bigelow knows how to ride that line. 

I know about nuclear arms proliferation. I know about the consequences of nuclear war. I have educated myself on the politics of these issues - but most people haven't - and I view a movie like this as important in terms of people coming to understand the chain of actions and decisions that result in real world consequences. Oppenheimer is the nuclear jumping off point that allows movies like A House of Dynamite to exist. It didn't scare me as much as I thought it would, and that's ok, because I think it will scare a lot of other people plenty. 

I would happily put this in a double feature next to Alex Garland's Warfare.