For almost as long as there have been nuclear weapons, there have been movies agonizing about the tortured class of professionals tasked with managing them.
Most famously, 1964 saw the twin-premised films Fail Safe and its more famous cousin, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Both depict U.S. decisionmakers reacting to a fictional nuclear accident in which an unauthorized U.S. missile is headed toward the Soviet Union, unable to be recalled, leaving decisionmakers to fret about how to negotiate, preempt, or retaliate their way out of total nuclear annihilation. Whereas Fail Safe portrayed all of this in sober, earnest terms as serious men doing serious work, Strangelove is a spiraling satire of psychosexual absurdity that paints everyone involved as either ridiculous or insane.
A terrifying new film from Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow, A House of Dynamite, dissects a modern-day nuclear crisis—in which a single intercontinental ballistic missile is heading toward the Midwest from an unknown, unattributed source in the Pacific. But while this scenario is good nightmare fodder, the movie limits itself to generating suspense without aspiring to say something that truly provokes.
Six decades on from Strangelove, as the United States finds itself with few new ideas for how to contend with the world’s most dangerous weapons, it seems the film industry has few new ideas for how to depict them.
Even though much has changed since those early days of the Cold War, the premise of A House of Dynamite is similar to that of Fail Safe or Strangelove. There are new members in the nuclear club, new delivery systems, new international treaties and domestic doctrines. What feels most different about this world is the unprecedented array of intelligence and communication tools available to decisionmakers. With the benefit of instant, simultaneous collaboration in the United States’ competent, highly professionalized governmental and military workforce, there aren’t supposed to be any surprises.
Bigelow exploits this novelty to probe more deeply into whether the United States’ escalatory instincts have matured. If Fail Safe and Strangelove hinged on worst-case scenarios, A House of Dynamite asks whether we’d get the same disastrous results under what can be considered normal conditions.
On what could be any given day in Washington, the movie unfolds in a triptych, the same 18 minutes of action played out three times from different perspectives: First, from the soldiers at the missile defense launch site at Fort Greely, Alaska, and officers in the White House Situation Room; then members of Stratcom, who join a conference call with the national security advisor’s staff; and eventually, the defense secretary and the president himself, who receives the news while making an appearance at a youth basketball camp.
As the clock ticks toward impact, the various parties struggle to assess the threat and determine a response. After Fort Greely’s ground-based interceptor fails its only chance to shoot down the missile, decisionmakers’ disbelief and professionalism quickly spirals into desperation and dread.
Without definitively knowing who launched the missile, what kind of impact it would have, and whether it’s the opening salvo of a broader attack, the characters agonize over how to respond. The competent Stratcom leader argues for a massive preemptive retaliation, believing the United States may need to use its weapons now or risk losing them later, while the inexperienced deputy national security advisor, one of the lone voices calling for restraint, struggles to persuasively make his case while sprinting through downtown Washington, shouting national security secrets into his AirPods for passing tourists to hear.
When the president is forced to decide, he is overwhelmed by the dearth of facts and surplus of opinions. Though he’s generally well-informed, the president complains that he actually knows very little about his nuclear options. “I had one briefing when I was sworn in. One. And they told me that’s the protocol,” he said. “I had a whole fucking briefing for when a Supreme Court justice dies, what to do if the replacement dies, and what to do if the original guy crawls out of his grave and wants his job back.”
Even for a best-case scenario, with a sensible president and an expert bureaucracy, it’s horrific.
Although propulsive and well-researched, A House of Dynamite is an excruciating watch, reanimating nuclear fears in stark colors for an audience that has plenty of other global crises to worry about.
That’s not to say there aren’t things for the wonks among us to nitpick. For instance, it’s highly unlikely that the entire satellite system responsible for tracking and identifying the threat would fail, as happens at the very beginning of the movie. It’s also unlikely that the threat would take the form of an out-of-the-blue attack in peacetime, rather than an escalation of another conflict, and that it would be aimed at Chicago instead of a strategic or military site. Most glaring, perhaps, is the notion that North Korea—the presumed but unconfirmed attacker—would intentionally and without provocation launch a single missile at the continental United States, since such a move would effectively amount to regime suicide. And though the 18-minute decision clock successfully underscores the time pressures leaders face, there’s little reason to not wait and see if the missile is real, what kind of impact it has, and confirm which country was responsible before responding.
Others may disagree, but I’m fine with letting most of this slide. It’s a movie, after all, and movies need plot. Besides, even viewed at this level, the movie’s premise is rather implausible—but it is possible. That’s the point.
Moreover, all of these implausible details allow Bigelow to better tease apart how people act when they must make choices under imperfect conditions. For instance, if there were a barrage of incoming missiles instead of just the one, and if they were aimed at strategic nuclear sites instead of a civilian center, it would be easy to rule out that this was not an accident or a spoof. And the options for retaliation would be much more obvious, with little argument for restraint or patience. Instead, the more unusual scenario forces decisionmakers to reckon with their uncertainty while weighing the potential consequences of guessing wrong. By taking some artistic license, the movie asks more interesting questions about retaliation, ones of a psychological and moral nature, rather than purely strategic.
As someone who has worked in the nuclear policy field, there’s much that I admire in A House of Dynamite. For one, the movie pours cold water on the assumption that the world’s largest defense budget can ever buy safety from nuclear weapons when risk is inherent in the systems that govern them. After failing to shoot down the incoming missile, the secretary of defense learns, seemingly for the first time, that this part of the United States’ missile defense system has a less-than-guaranteed chance of success. “So it’s a fucking coin toss?” he asks. “That’s what $50 billion buys us?”
Bigelow injects humanity into a policy debate so often stripped of it. The movie underscores that real, breathing humans are tasked with making potentially catastrophic decisions for all of us. And while assessing an incoming strike and its potential effects, they’re also thinking about their sick kid at home, their pregnant wife, their estranged daughter, or even the ball game last night. It’s a bit trite, but a refreshing change of pace from the average nuclear policy conversation in Washington that treats officials as unfailingly rational, and civilians as an afterthought.
In interviews, Bigelow has been quite plain that she intends the movie to “explore the madness of a world that lives under the constant shadow of annihilation, yet rarely speaks of it.” She has also not been shy about her broader political aims, describing the film as a call to action for reducing nuclear stockpiles. “My hope is the movie acts as a question and the audience has the opportunity to answer it,” she told Newsweek. “Will they move that ball forward? Will they take up the challenge? … That’s the question that the film asks.”
But the movie’s formal choices render it incapable of true provocation, and I often found myself wishing that instead of considered neutrality, it would venture to say something gutsier.
Bigelow aims for persuasion by way of total sensory immersion, collecting and laying out every real-world element she can without much commentary, allowing viewers to draw their own conclusions. That approach works for movies like The Hurt Locker or Zero Dark Thirty, where the point is to probe moral ambiguity and complex characters, but it falls flat here where those characters don’t exist and the goal is to motivate viewers to act rather than merely make them think.
The problem for civilians nowadays is not lack of information about the world’s horrors but an inability to catalyze real-world change. A House of Dynamite seems to be critiquing the entire system, rather than any particular part, but it’s too shy to call for tearing it all down, or otherwise say something loud or angry enough to cut through the insanity. It certainly agitates its viewers, but it fails to offer a clear direction for that agitation.
Diagnosing the problem with nuclear weapons is easy, and it’s been done before. The much more difficult—and urgent—task is to imagine a way beyond the problem. Without that, we viewers are no better off than these characters debating the unthinkable on a video conference call, pinned to our seats and screens, both too terrified and impotent to believe we can change our fate.
Maybe every generation needs a movie to simply remind them of nuclear dangers, but awareness is hardly a worthy opponent for “madness,” as Bigelow calls it. Strangelove had no solutions for the world’s nuclear problems, but it at least rejected the notion that such a system could be portrayed in earnest or sober terms. In that movie, debates among nuclear decisionmakers become violent brawls (leading to the iconic line, “No fighting in the war room!”). It ends with an odd series of scenes: Nazi salutes, a pilot riding a missile like a bull, and a montage of mushroom clouds set to Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again.” Originally, the movie was supposed to culminate in a slapstick pie fight, leaving the world’s most powerful men covered in cream.
At this point, merely depicting nuclear crises, even with a forensic attention to detail, is not enough. The present moment demands a sublime, unapologetically opinionated perspective, or at least an absurd one.
A House of Dynamite left me wishing for a critique as explosive as the weapons it depicts.
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