It’s not often the Pentagon comments on a Netflix release. But in an October 16 memo, officials contested the accuracy of A House of Dynamite, the latest from director Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty), which is currently streaming.
In the film, which portrays a nuclear attack on the U.S., the secretary of defense (Jared Harris) is shocked to learn that an interceptor missile has only a 61 percent chance of taking out an incoming warhead, describing it as a “coin toss.” The real-life Pentagon claims the chances of neutralizing an attack are actually 100 percent. In a recent NPR piece on the film, Middlebury College global security scholar Jeffrey Lewis said the “coin toss” figure is indeed accurate for any one interceptor, though multiple ones would be fired in reality.
One thing is beyond dispute: Bigelow has broken her eight-year hiatus with a movie that grabs your attention.
The deal
When military personnel in Alaska detect an intercontinental ballistic missile crossing the Pacific, they assume it’s another North Korean test flight that will fall harmlessly into the ocean. They’re wrong. The nuclear warhead is headed straight for the U.S. Midwest, and intercepting it is no simple matter.
Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) presides over the chaos in the White House Situation Room as everyone attempts to reach the president (Idris Elba), who’s doing a meet and greet with schoolchildren. While the head of U.S. Strategic Command (Tracy Letts) counsels an immediate retaliatory strike against the nation’s enemies, the deputy national security adviser (Gabriel Basso) tries to use diplomacy to avert full-out nuclear war. Meanwhile, a Federal Emergency Management Agency official (Moses Ingram) must execute contingency plans she never dreamed she would need.
The story plays out three times over the same roughly 15 minutes between the missile’s detection and its projected impact. In each iteration, we see the action from a different set of perspectives, moving up the chain of command from first responders to the president.
Will you like it?
As a cautionary tale exploring an arguably plausible scenario, A House of Dynamite is terrifyingly effective. But any viewer who expects something different — such as a highbrow action thriller or disaster flick — will be disappointed and perhaps aggrieved.
It’s easy to see why many consider the film a bait and switch. Oscar winner Bigelow started out in the action genre. A House of Dynamite has thriller pacing, breakneck editing and immersive camera work. Like the TV series “24,” it happens in a facsimile of real time. Like the pandemic disaster film Contagion, it’s an intricately detailed procedural with a vast cast of characters about whom we learn just enough to find them vaguely sympathetic.
Bigelow and writer Noah Oppenheim diverge from those predecessors with their three-act structure, however, which rehashes the same events from different angles rather than follow them to their logical conclusion. Our instinct is to want to see the story play out to its end, horrific or no. The filmmakers repeatedly frustrate our expectations and deprive us of that basic narrative satisfaction.
And they know exactly what they’re doing. The point of A House of Dynamite is not to demonstrate that a nuclear attack would be devastating. Anyone who grew up during the Cold War already sees that possibility in their nightmares. This movie is about readiness — specifically, about what it means to imagine you can prepare for the unimaginable.
That’s why the whole film builds to the president’s conversation with the aide (Jonah Hauer-King) assigned to brief him on his options. There’s dark humor in the aide’s remark that he refers to different levels of retaliation as “rare, medium and well done,” as in the president’s admission that he spent less time preparing for this possibility than he did for the death of a Supreme Court justice.
Ferguson is riveting as a mom who sets personal concerns aside to do her high-stress job. Yet courage isn’t enough to save anyone from a situation in which, as Basso’s character puts it, the options are “surrender or suicide.” Does the screenplay stack the deck in framing this particular scenario? Clearly — hence the debate — but the point stands.
A House of Dynamite frustrates us because we want to believe competence and ingenuity could save the day. We want to believe things have changed since the fictional DEFCON 1 crisis of 1983’s WarGames, which ended with the moral that “The only way to win the game is not to play.” This movie has its own cautionary metaphor, though: People can get used to anything, even living in a house of dynamite, but that doesn’t mean it won’t blow.
If you like this, try…
The Man Who Saved the World (2014; Pluto TV, Prime Video, Roku Channel, Tubi, rentable): In 1983, the world came perilously close to a nuclear war caused by a false alarm. This documentary profiles the Soviet army officer who stopped it.
The Hurt Locker (2008; Netflix, YouTube Primetime, rentable): Bigelow’s drama about a bomb-defusing team in Iraq won the Best Picture Oscar, then came under fire for its inaccuracies.
Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself — While the Rest of Us Die (2017 book): Vermont resident Garrett M. Graff wrote this history of the Pennsylvania bunker designed to preserve high-ranking officials in the event of a nuclear attack, which features prominently in A House of Dynamite. Another possible influence on the film is journalist Annie Jacobsen’s 2024 book Nuclear War: A Scenario.
This article appears in Oct 29 – Nov 4 2025.
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