In Kathryn Bigelow’s thoughtful nail-biter A House of Dynamite, a ballistic missile armed with a nuclear warhead is on its way to annihilate an American city. American military and national security officials have only minutes to act. That’s a terrifying scenario, and Bigelow knows that portraying it in exacting, realistic detail is very, very scary. She also forces the audience to undertake an intellectual exercise, thinking through What would I do?
All of us Americans – and all the Russian people – understand that if Russia were to launch a nuclear strike on the US, that the US would then automatically retaliate and destroy the military and economic capacity of Russia, along with most of its residents. And vice-versa. In that case, all the decision-makers know the procedures to implement, already carefully thought out in advance.
But what happens if we don’t know WHO has fired a nuclear warhead at us? That very central ambiguity would make decisions very much NOT automatic.
Most of us know that the US President is shadowed by a military officer carrying a briefcase (“the football”) that contains the codes authorizing nuclear warfare. Some of us know that select officials would be evacuated to nuke-proof bunkers. And that, in the event our top 36 leaders are wiped out at once, there’s a 37th person designated to take command. Here, Bigelow takes us inside to show us what all this would actually look like.
Most of the national security chain of command is highly trained to dal with the situations that the rest of see only as vague contingencies. These folks know exactly what their responsibilities are and what to do. Of course, they are human, and they recognize the consequences of the actions that they are trained to take and the impacts those situations will have on their loved ones. I’m talking here about the National Security staff in the situation room, the top military commanders, the folks tasked with launching defensive missiles from their silos and that young guy carrying “the football”,
But the President and Defense Secretary (try for a moment to forget the current occupants of those offices), press aides and others in the government probably don’t have that background, and must deal with a broadband of topics. With just an orientation briefing when they took office, they would essentially be thinking all this through for the first time, like the rest of us.
Bigelow also reminds us that a crisis may occur when we’re on vacation, running late to work, at some forgettable photo op, or when our spouse is taking the feverish kid to the doctor. Civil War re-enactments have their value, but juxtaposed with an impending nuclear holocaust… Time waits for no one, as they say.
Idris Elba and Jared Harris are superb as the President and Defense Secretary, plunged into a crisis they would never, never have chosen to address. As the national security and military pros, Rebecca Ferguson, Jason Clarke, Tracey Letts and Anthony Ramos are similarly excellent.
We see so many national security thrillers with ridiculously implausible plots (The Diplomat and Hostage are recent examples) that it’s both welcome and bracing to see a screenplay so realistic. Bigelow gets everything right, down to how female decision-makers in DC wear comfy shoes to the office and change into dress shoes after passing though the metal detector.
I love movies that tell their stories in real time. Here, the key part of the story is only seven minutes long, so Bigelow tells it again and again from the perspective of different characters.
Along with being the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar, Kathryn Bigelow (K-19: The Widowmaker, The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty) may be our greatest national security filmmaker ever. A House of Dynamite is thoughtful, chilling and one of the Best Movies of 2025 – So Far.
A House of Dynamite is in theaters and begins streaming on Netflix this Friday. The immersive experience of a movie theater was great for A House of Dynamite; if you’re streaming it at home on Netflix at home, turn off the lights in the room, crank up the volume on the TV and silence the notifications on your phone.