Crew
Director – Kathryn Bigelow, Screenplay – Noah Oppenheim, Producers – Kathryn Bigelow, Noah Oppenheim & Greg Shapiro, Photography – Barry Ackroyd, Music – Volker Bertelmann, Visual Effects Supervisor – Chris Harvey, Visual Effects – Distillery VFX (Supervisor – Jon Mitchell), Special Effects Supervisor – Devin Maggio, Production Design – Jeremy Hindle. Production Company – First Light Pictures/Kingsgate Pictures/Prologue Entertainment.
Cast
Idris Elba (POTUS), Rebecca Ferguson (Captain Olivia Walker), Gabriel Basso (Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington), Jared Harris (Secretary of Defense Reed Baker), Tracy Letts (General Anthony Brady), Anthony Ramos (Major Daniel Gonzalez), Jason Clarke (Admiral Mark Miller), Jonah Hauer-King (Lieutenant Commander Robert Reeves), Malachi Beasley (SCPO William Davis), Moses Ingram (Cathy Rogers), Willa Fitzgerald (Abby Jansing), Renee Elise Goldsberry (The First Lady), Greta Lee (Ana Park), Brian Tee (SAIC Ken Cho), Gbenga Akinnagbe (Major General Steve Kyle), Kyle Allen (Captain John Zimmer), Brittany O’Grady (Lily Baerington), Kaitlyn Dever (Caroline Baker)
Plot
Inclination is Flattering: Captain Olivia Walker goes to work at the White House Situation Room to abruptly be faced with an unidentified missile launch that is on a course for the continental US. The origin point is unclear but it is quickly determined that the missile is on a trajectory to strike Chicago within nineteen minutes. An attempt is made to launch intercepts to shoot the incoming down. When this fails, the dread realisation sinks in that the missile will strike. Hitting a Bullet with a Bullet: Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington is on his way to work at the White House when the missile alert comes in. Jake attempts to find out where the missile comes from and defuse the international situation when everything mandates a swift response. A House Filled With Dynamite: The President is attending a school basketball game when the news comes in. He rushed to safety as pressure mounts on all sides for him to come up with a response to the situation.
Kathryn Bigelow has long been a director on Moria’s radar ever since she made a startling arrival on the genre scene with her second work, the modern-day vampire film Near Dark (1987). Her next film was the psycho-thriller Blue Steel (1990), produced by Oliver Stone, followed by the commercial success of the original Point Break (1991). In between this was a marriage to James Cameron. This was followed by a string of uneven box-office successes with the millennial Virtual Reality film Strange Days (1995), the historical murder mystery The Weight of Water (2000) and the submarine drama K19: The Widowmaker (2002). She made a substantial return to form with the highly acclaimed Iraq War film The Hurt Locker (2008), which netted her an Academy Award as Best Director, followed by Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Detroit (2017), all strong, dramatically charged works.
With A House of Dynamite, Kathryn Bigelow takes on making a Nuclear War film. This was a genre that was in its heyday in the 1950s beginning with Five (1951) and reaching a peak into the 1960s with works such as On the Beach (1959), Dr Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Fail-Safe (1964) and The War Game (1965). The genre saw a resurgence in the 1980s with films such as Malevil (1981), The Day After (1983), Testament (1983), When the Wind Blows (1986), Miracle Mile (1988), the Soviet-made Letters from a Dead Man (1986) and the anime Barefoot Gen (1983). Some of the best works were on television with Special Bulletin (1983), Countdown to Looking Glass (1984), Threads (1984), Rules of Engagement (1989) and By Dawn’s Early Light (1990). With the easing off of Cold War tensions, there have only been sporadic nuclear films made since with the likes of Crimson Tide (1995), Deterrence (1999), The Sum of All Fears (2022) and The Divide (2011).
A House of Dynamite forms the third in a trilogy of sorts for Bigelow with The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. They are films about the US military and have boots planted squarely on the side of the establishment. In particular, Zero Dark Thirty and A House of Dynamite are works that are almost documentary-like, looking on at the bustling machinery of military and governmental apparatus – just watching and observing, but neutral in terms of forming an opinion. Zero Dark Thirty didn’t blink once about the inclusion of Guantanamo Bay ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques and similarly A House of Dynamite remains neutral and offers no critical position either for or against the US government’s nuclear strategy.
One thing that A House of Dynamite leaves you with is the certainty that Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim (surely an ironic name for someone writing a script about nuclear war) have researched the way the US nuclear response operates and are determined to make a work that is as realistic as possible. They spoke to a number of people who had been employed in the real Missile Defense Agency in the same positions that are depicted here and hired several of these as consultants on the film. The Pentagon released a statement saying the depiction was inaccurate and their ability to intercept an incoming warhead was one hundred percent effective to which Oppenheim countered that he “respectfully disagreed.”
It also becomes apparent as we go on that the storyline is not linear. We follow three consecutive story strands, all of which it becomes apparent are occurring concurrently within the nineteen-minute timeframe before the missile impacts – we even see characters from one storyline appear on screens in other stories or see pieces of dialogue uttered from different viewpoints. The first of these stories follows the detection of the incoming missile at the White House Situation Room and at a Missile Defense Battalion in Alaska; the second follows the military at Strategic Command and analyst Anthony Basso as he arrives at the White House Emergency Operations Center; and the third Idris Elba’s President as he receives news and is rushed to safety. It should be added that the plot follows the build up to the strike and the moments after, while the last sections hinge on what the right response should be, but what happens after that point is left unspoken. The detonation itself is not depicted.
If there is one of the above nuclear war films that A House of Dynamite can be compared to it might be Fail-Safe. They are quite dissimilar works in many ways but both have similar plots about an accidental nuclear release where the drama cuts back and forth in a documentary-like fashion between responses in the strategic command centers with a good deal of operational doubletalk, and feature the president torn as to what the correct response would be.
Everything here is balanced and neutral. You have only to think how the entire scenario would have played out if it had been written with the current orange-haired occupant of the White House and his sycophantic cronies, where the whole issue of a retaliatory response would have been a “hell, yeah, which country has insulted me the most lately?” without even pausing. It would have been a comedy of errors perhaps even blacker than Dr Strangelove ended up being.
If there is a message that A House of Dynamite has it is perhaps that the nuclear response system in the US is cumbersome and likely to be held up by small technical errors or the very procedures and safeguards that are built into the system. Gabriel Basso’s urgent phone conversation trying to impart information is held by his having to pass the phone through the White House’s security x-ray; people protest that the designated evacuee at FEMA is someone who has only been on the job for a month; the attempt to patch the Russian politicians through on a call to the President faces a technical error trying to get the two calls to link up; while much is repeatedly made of the fact that trying to shoot down the incoming missile is like trying to hit a bullet with a bullet.
(Nominee for Best Actor (Idris Elba) at this site’s Best of 2025 Awards).
Trailer here