‘A House of Dynamite’: Bigelow’s latest thriller shows why nuclear bombs are only part of the danger

By Erik English | October 9, 2025

A House of Dynamite. Rebecca Ferguson as Captain Olivia Walker in A House of Dynamite. Cr. Eros Hoagland/Netflix © 2025.Share

Editor’s note: Contains spoilers

Kathryn Bigelow is no stranger to tense, realistic, political thrillers. Her 2008 film, The Hurt Locker, is a dark exploration of the psychology of bomb-disarming soldiers during the Iraq War. The Hurt Locker was nominated for nine Oscars and won six, including Best Picture and Best Director, the first win for a female director. In 2012, she tackled the nearly 10-year hunt for Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty, which triggered internal investigations at the CIA over whether classified information had been revealed to the filmmakers. Now, she’s setting her sights on the risk of a nuclear attack on the United States. Her latest film, A House of Dynamite, describes how the US government would respond to a nuclear attack on the United States in real-time.

Told from the perspective of soldiers at a remote Alaskan missile base, staffers in the White House situation room, military officials at US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), and the president of the United States, the film weaves an overlapping timeline to show how the United States would respond to a missile attack. As with her other films, A House of Dynamite strives to present a realistic vision to the audience—showcasing where and how decisions about nuclear weapons are made. At the Venice film festival where the film premiered, it was nominated for the Golden Lion, the fest’s highest award.

After Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2024, it’s no surprise to see other directors making films about the risk of nuclear weapons. What sets this one apart, however, is its contemporary setting. All of the events portrayed in A House of Dynamite could happen at any moment—today, even. And that’s the point.

A normal day. The film starts on a day like any other, with staffers navigating traffic on their morning commute into their offices and making small talk about their kids. Even when an object is first detected in flight over the Pacific, it’s nothing out of the ordinary—routine, unimportant. Because of malfunctioning satellite detection, or possibly a cyberattack, the source of this single nuclear missile is unknown; it is initially assumed to be a North Korean missile test that will crash into the Pacific. Attacking with a single missile would likely be an indicator of a false alarm or malfunctioning system, as an actual attack probably wouldn’t rely on just one missile—there would be hundreds of ICBMs, not to mention the decoys. In fact, that reasoning is how Russian officer Stanislav Petrov deduced in 1983 that the five American missiles his computer showed heading towards the Soviet Union were actually a system malfunction.

Staffers in the White House Situation Room and US Strategic Command set about calculating the destination of the missile. Officials are dismissive of the danger until additional satellite data arrives scant minutes later and reveals the weapon is destined for somewhere in the continental United States, and countermeasures are initiated.

A missile launched from somewhere in the far western Pacific would take roughly 37 minutes from the first split-second it launches to land somewhere in the continental United States. As the clock ticks, soldiers at Fort Greely, a remote outpost in Alaska, begin launch preparations for a Ground-Based Interceptor (GBI) missile to destroy the incoming nuclear device; but the interception attempt fails.

GBIs are part of the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, which has cost more than $60 billion since its founding back in 2004. The notion that one of those missiles could fail in the event of an actual attack is not far-fetched. After a 2017 test, the Pentagon reported that the GMD system only had a “limited capacity” to defend the United States from a North Korean or Iranian missile attack.

In fact, the GBIs housed at Fort Greely are thought to have a 56 percent likelihood of destroying an inbound nuclear weapon—in carefully scripted trials that can’t distinguish between warheads and decoys or other complications a real-world attack would almost certainly include. Donald Trump has claimed that when launched four at a time, they have a 97 percent kill rate—but that estimate again ignores any possibility of decoys and assumes that if one interceptor failed, as happens in the film, the same manufacturing or computational error wouldn’t also affect the others.

Pakistan nuclear weapons, 2025

As reality sets in that the missile has not been destroyed, satellite data reveals its target: Chicago. Emergency evacuation orders are issued, and anyone who is included on a designated survivor list is summarily whisked away to underground bunkers, organized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). It’s a compelling portrait of how soldiers and national security staffers remain calm and respond in a crisis. “The movie depicts human beings experiencing absolute terror and uncertainty, while continuing to press ahead,” said Alex Bell, Bulletin president and CEO—and formerly the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Affairs in the Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrence, and Stability at the US State Department.

While the missile is still in flight and less than 20 minutes from Chicago, characters’ motivations shift from defense to offense, and two primary perspectives emerge. One side advocates a retaliatory strike; the other, nothing. “It’s surrender or suicide,” one adviser tells the President.

Subverting expectations. Bigelow tends to pay homage to a genre while subverting expectations—and many of the themes explored in A House of Dynamite can be seen in previous films. Her 1991 film, Point Break, initially presents itself as a campy action flick in which FBI Agent Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) obsessively infiltrates and hunts down a gang of bank-robbing surfers known as “The Ex-Presidents,” led by Bodhi (Patrick Swayze). Ultimately, however, Point Break is less about crime and more about taking risks to feel human, while challenging prevailing notions around male relationships and masculinity. As film critic Priscilla Page explains, “It’s a film where you don’t want the good guy to catch the bad guy, where the hero is seduced by an antihero.”

That same embrace of danger and risk to feel human was a central theme of The Hurt Locker. As Bigelow explained in 2010, “It became really fascinating to explore the psychology behind the type of soldier who volunteers for this particular conflict and then, because of his or her aptitude, is chosen and given the opportunity to go into bomb disarmament and goes toward what everybody else is running from.”

The obsessive hunt for a villain is also subverted in Zero Dark Thirty, with the climax of the film downplayed. When bin Laden is shot by a member of Seal Team Six during the Abbottabad raid, there is no immediate celebration. When the obsessive CIA Agent Maya (Jessica Chastain) identifies bin Laden’s body, she is unsmiling and joyless. The film ends with Maya boarding a plane and the pilot asking where she wants to go, but all she can do is cry. After 10 years of obsessively hunting bin Laden, resorting to torture for any bit of information available, having lost friends in terrorist attacks, all that’s left is to grapple with what it took to catch him. Bin Laden was caught, but at what cost?

A House of Dynamite likewise challenges conventional expectations. While everyone in the film responds correctly—courageously even—they ultimately fail. The heroes don’t win. The film doesn’t want viewers to ask themselves how to thwart a nuclear attack on the United States. Rather, it wants the viewer to question the value of having nuclear weapons at all. “None of this makes sense,” the President (Idris Elba) bemoans, “Making all these bombs and all these plans.”

When asked about her motivation for making the film, Bigelow recalled the safety drills for school children in Cold War-era America. “I grew up in an era when hiding under your school desk was considered the go-to protocol for surviving an atomic bomb. It seems absurd now—and it was—but at the time, the threat felt so immediate that such measures were taken seriously. Today, the danger has only escalated.” Indeed, the danger is higher than it has ever been and the Doomsday Clock is the closest to midnight it has ever been, a reality that may be hard to forget when watching Bigelow’s film.

The relevance of movies about nuclear weapons may, in and of itself, be a bad omen. Nuclear weapons as a plot device were most popular at the height of the Cold War. In 1959, Stanley Kramer’s adaptation of On the Beach contemplated life in the aftermath of a nuclear war—with high-profile actors like Gregory Peck and Fred Astaire navigating how to spend their last days as they wait for radiation sickness to set in. Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove, explored the absurdity of nuclear deterrence. As Roger Ebert pointed out, “if a ‘nuclear deterrent’ destroys all life on Earth, it is hard to say exactly what it has deterred.” Ebert went on to call Dr. Strangelove “arguably the best political satire of the century.”

What we should be talking about after watching Bigelow’s ‘A House of Dynamite’ nuclear thriller

In general, the number of movies made about nuclear weapons has been declining since the 1980s and the end of the Cold War. Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning Oppenheimer, however, seems to have put the genre back in vogue, with Bigelow’s film set to premiere in theaters on October 10 and to begin streaming on Netflix on October 24th, and James Cameron announcing his own nuclear-themed film, an adaptation of the Charles Pellegrino book Ghosts of Hiroshima.

This is reality. In mid-August, I attended an advance showing of A House of Dynamite at The Motion Picture Association headquarters in Washington, D.C., just a few blocks from the White House. On the day I saw the film, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and multiple European leaders were attempting to dissuade Donald Trump from strong-arming the Ukrainian president into a one-sided ceasefire agreement to end the war with Russia.

Throughout the war, Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly resorted to nuclear saber-rattling as a tool of intimidation. Trump, who has tweeted his own brand of nuclear intimidation in the past, seems more skeptical of the value of nuclear weapons in his second term. “There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. We already have so many,” Trump said in February.

On this, Trump and Bigelow seem to agree. “Multiple nations possess enough nuclear weapons to end civilization within minutes,” Bigelow says. “And yet, there’s a kind of collective numbness—a quiet normalization of the unthinkable. How can we call this ‘defense’ when the inevitable outcome is total destruction? I wanted to make a film that confronts this paradox—to explore the madness of a world that lives under the constant shadow of annihilation, yet rarely speaks of it.”

A House of Dynamite is a terrifying examination of how terribly wrong things can go even with highly competent people in charge. As Bell emphasized, the ability of federal workers and national security personnel to remain calm in a crisis and go about their duties is paramount in an emergency. “The scene where two Situation Room workers take each other’s hands in a moment of shared fear and humanity and then get back to work is a perfect example of what we ask of our federal workers,” she said. “Indeed, that’s something our historically strong commitment to the military and civil service brought us: people who will do their jobs, even in the face of terror.”

But that’s also not necessarily the world we’re living in.

In the real world of the Trump administration, scores of experts who work on nuclear deterrence have been fired from the State Department. FEMA, which plays a critical emergency response role in the film, was slated for drastic reductions in personnel or even elimination before disastrous flooding in Texas this summer forced the administration to reconsider some of the proposed downsizing. European leaders had to drop everything to prevent the US president from capitulating to an adversary that invaded a neighboring state while making threats to use nuclear weapons. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman recently explained to the Bulletin, “Expertise is not only not valued by this administration, it’s inherently suspicious to them. Somebody who actually knows what they’re talking about can’t be trusted.”

Trump has consistently shown an aversion to nuclear weapons, but his distrust of expertise and his desperation to end the war in Ukraine (and perhaps a chance at winning a Nobel Peace Prize) have made him oblivious to the costs of a one-sided peace deal. Meanwhile, the federal government is firing nuclear weapons experts in droves. The film shows why the worst can happen, even when competent, well-meaning people are trying to do the right thing.

But what if competence and decency are in short supply?