Certain premises make for perfect movies, so they keep being repeated. Boy meets girl. Rags to riches. And another that seems remarkably durable: nuclear holocaust has been triggered. We may or may not know why, and we may or may not be able to do anything about it.
This is the setup of Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film, “A House of Dynamite” on Netflix, which springs from the terrifying setup that the relatively peaceful period — at least when it comes to worrying about nukes — that came with the end of the Cold War is now over. A ballistic missile is bound for Chicago. Now what?
“A House of Dynamite” is a deeply researched, almost unbearably taut thriller that eventually mutates into a character study, examining how public servants proceed with their duties when staring the end of the world straight in the eye.
The thriller is part of the grand tradition of Hollywood movies born from nuke anxiety — and, perhaps because the unthinkably high stakes generate a kind of frantic lunacy, they come in several genres, including farce, comedy and panicked drama. Many of them derive tension from a similar question: Should some humans be sacrificed to save more of humanity? Should we strike back pre-emptively or wait to find out what happened? Who can we trust?
And they all work at feature-film length for the same reason: The tick-tick-tick of the missile’s approach provides the perfect plot device; time is literally running out. Here’s a look at the best of them.
‘Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’
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