The most terrifying thing about nuclear weapons isn’t the warheads, but how quiet we as a society have become about them. The Cold War-era fear of total annihilation has morphed into a dangerous cultural amnesia that Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow finds deafening. With her newest film, A House of Dynamite, she is determined to make the world listen again.
“I think the fact that the conversation has drifted off has a lot to do with the fact that nuclear weapons have sort of been normalized,” Bigelow tells Newsweek. “And that in and of itself is a pretty terrifying idea. And the fact that we don’t look at it with the kind of global annihilation prospect that we should. I mean, we don’t tend to take it very seriously.”
The film itself is a searing political thriller starring Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Tracy Letts, Jared Harris, Jason Clarke and Anthony Ramos as government officials grappling with the real-time reality of an incoming nuclear missile. The film plunges audiences into a terrifying 18 minutes replayed from different vantage points within the American government as several agencies scramble to respond to an unidentified nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile hurtling toward North America.
“We wanted to tell the story in real time,” says screenwriter Noah Oppenheim. “We wanted the audience to experience how short 18 minutes is.”
For Bigelow, the film is hypothetical, designed to “unpack what would happen” in the halls of power during an unthinkable crisis.
The ignorance about the dangers of nuclear warfare can be traced back to a single moment in history, according to Oppenheim. “I think the end of the Cold War was a turning point,” he says. “Once the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a sense of false relief that like, ‘OK, the threat had ended.’”
But that threat didn’t end. It mutated, becoming stronger and more complex. The numbers today paint a terrifying picture. “There are, at present count, over 12,000 warheads in the world today,” Bigelow adds. “There’s nine nuclear countries, only three are members of NATO.”
The proverbial nuclear boogeyman, as it were, never left. It just got quieter. Faced with this silence, what compelled Bigelow to make the loudest film of her career? A civil obligation.
Sounding the Alarm
Bigelow is no stranger to films with political ramifications that examine the high-pressure mechanics of American institutions under duress. With The Hurt Locker, she explored the impact of bomb squads in the Iraq War. For her work, she received the Academy Award for Best Director, becoming the first woman to win that prize. She followed that with intelligence analysts on the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty. This journalistic curiosity into the inner workings of government institutions was never just about compelling stories for Bigelow; rather—and particularly with A House of Dynamite—it is meant to be an intervention of sorts for audiences.
“We’re in a kind of hair trigger environment with so many military engagements around the world,” Bigelow says. “And my hope is to discuss the reduction of the nuclear stockpile. I feel like this film is, for me anyway, a call to action.”
To universalize that exhortation, Bigelow and Oppenheim made a crucial decision not to identify a country of origin for the film’s fictional attack. By leaving this ambiguous, they’re able to focus the movie’s attention on the fragility of the system itself.
“It was important to Kathryn and [me] that there not be a villain in the movie,” Oppenheim says. “If it’s one country launching a missile that we know who’s responsible, it becomes a very different story. It becomes a story about that country’s villainy and that country’s aggression. Giving the audience one bad guy to blame is, I think, too easy, a cop-out.”
This apolitical approach extends to the depiction of the president in the film, presenting what Oppenheim calls a “best case scenario” of a person who is of “well-intentioned, thoughtful, responsible character.” By showing a capable president’s uncertainty amid an unthinkable attack, they’re able to demonstrate that the crisis isn’t about the person who holds the power, but rather the faults of a system that puts this much power into the hands of one person.
“The best case is you have somebody who is serious about the job, has thought about this issue at least a little bit and wants to do the right thing. And then you see a person like that, the sort of ideal, and then you realize, even with the perfect person in that seat, it’s an impossible scenario because there’s just no human being on the planet who should have the fate of all mankind in their hands and only three or four minutes to make the call. No person is capable of dealing with that kind of pressure and the weight of that kind of responsibility.”
Giving the audience the information in this way was key for Bigelow to start the conversation she hopes the film will inspire. But it will only be effective if it can reach a global audience. To Bigelow, a nuclear threat is a borderless problem that requires a borderless conversation. That’s why having the film distributed by the global streaming giant Netflix was particularly appealing.
“These are not problems that are discrete to a particular location. Netflix is the perfect launchpad for this because it is global, and that’s the only way to begin to embrace this as a problem.”
And this partnership with Netflix shows Bigelow’s commitment to get as many eyes on it as possible. Bigelow’s respect for and trust in the audience is clear: they are not just consumers of entertainment, but rather active participants with real power to effect change. She sees A House of Dynamite as a transfer of responsibility from the screen to the viewer.
“My hope is the movie acts as a question and the audience has the opportunity to answer it,” Bigelow says. “Will they move that ball forward? Will they take up the challenge? And that’s the question that the film asks.”
But for that problem to be wholly understood and the audience committed to it, they need to feel the weight of it. To convey this, Bigelow had to embrace a duality herself. On one hand, there’s the forensic approach to accuracy. On the other, there are the small, fragile moments of humanity amid the chaos. And this reveals perhaps the most terrifying truth of A House of Dynamite: The agencies within the government tasked with protecting us and their processes may be meticulously designed, but the people tasked with protecting us are just as human as we are.
Authenticity Meets Humanity
Before Bigelow can even show the imperfect human at the core of the infallible machine, she first needs to build a world with impeccable realism. A signature of her filmmaking, this commitment to authenticity isn’t just an artistic necessity, it’s yet another responsibility she feels to her subject and audience.
“When you’re inviting the audience into these locations, it’s really important that you be responsible to those locations,” Bigelow explains. “And that’s why [Lt. Gen.] Dan[iel] Karbler and our various other tech advisers were so critical to this movie. I mean, Dan was there beside me every day we were shooting.”
That adviser, a retired three-star general who once commanded U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command and also appears in the film, confirms and commends Bigelow’s commitment.
“As a military guy, I’ve watched a ton of military movies, and all my buddies, you know the deal, they all sit there like, ‘Can you believe that?’” Karbler says. “You will not find any of those kinds of mistakes [in this film].”
This level of access to high-level consultants was only possible because of the credibility Bigelow has built with figures in the military industrial complex over the course of her career, Oppenheim says.
“As soon as they heard that Kathryn was the filmmaker,” he notes, “a lot of doors opened.”
But the accuracy of the details is not the end goal, it’s only a starting point. Building this credible universe of the White House Situation Room, the United States Strategic Command center and the United States Army launch site at Fort Greely in Alaska only served as the backdrop for the film’s real subject: the unpredictable humans at the heart of these institutions.
“If we don’t treat this problem on a human scale, it can’t just be on a mechanical scale,” Bigelow insists. “It’s a human problem because that’s what we’re looking at. Basically, the potential end of civilization.”
In another director’s hands, the focus of a film like this would likely be on the action, with emotion as an afterthought. But Bigelow seamlessly blends them together in a way that is both relatable and terrifying.
A powerful symbol of this is Rebecca Ferguson’s performance as Capt. Olivia Walker, who leads the White House command center. Amid the heart-pounding 18 minutes they have before the missile hits, Walker finds a toy dinosaur in her pocket, a reminder of the child at home she likely will never see again.
“The dinosaur was something that I just picked up…. It just brought in this sort of relatable momentum of humanity,” Ferguson says. “Every person in that room has children or relationships or parents, but they’re extremely good at what they do. And had we not brought in those little elements of fracture and humanity, it’s very hard to relate to it.”
“It could be looked at as a note of extinction,” Bigelow adds. “It’s a kind of wonderful, complicated little signifier there. And we’re reminded that that’s what’s at stake. You don’t come back from a nuclear engagement. I mean, you just don’t.”
Anthony Ramos, who plays Maj. Daniel Gonzalez in the Fort Greely command center, puts it more plainly.
“They’re people, man,” Ramos says. “They are people who get news that a bomb is coming their way. It don’t get any more plain than that.”
The Ultimate Question
If the people tasked with executing these orders to protect humanity are only human and prone to respond emotionally, why would we allow a system to exist that places the fate of the entire world in the hands of just one of them? This is why Bigelow and Oppenheim wanted to know from their source in the Pentagon and CIA how often the president practices for a scenario like the one depicted in A House of Dynamite. The answer they got was alarming.
“My friend, our source, said hardly ever at all,” Oppenheim says. “The president, who’s a civilian, gets elected, maybe gets a single briefing on the nuclear football that’s going to be following him around. Here’s how it would work. And then after that, doesn’t really engage with the issue in any meaningful way. And so that was terrifying to us because, when you think about the person who has all of the authority, [they have] the least expertise and the least practice, no matter who that person is, just by nature of being a civilian who’s just been elected president. And so that was particularly terrifying.”
The film ends with Idris Elba’s U.S. president making an impossible decision—to retaliate or wait it out, “suicide or surrender,” as the film and Karbler put it. Watching him react in a totally human way—shocked, scared, but focused—reveals the real linchpin of the argument of A House of Dynamite. It’s not that a well-intentioned yet ultimately flawed person in the role of president of the United States might make the wrong decision, but rather that the system forces even an ideal leader into an impossible decision.
“We had a lot of conversations with Senator Sam Nunn, who has a foundation called Nuclear Threat Initiative, and one of the subjects that’s most important to him is this idea of sole authority,” Bigelow says. “The president has sole authority to make a decision about a nuclear strike or nuclear retaliation or not. And it’s sole authority, meaning that person alone will make that decision. I guess what might be important to consider is when we vote, we may be voting for a person who may be possibly in that position and have to make that decision.”
It’s in offering audiences the knowledge to ask these questions of their leaders, and of the system they live under, that Bigelow sees as her ultimate legacy. When asked what she hopes people take away from her body of work, she echoes that journalistic curiosity that has driven her most impactful work.
“I’d love the takeaway, certainly from this film, for an audience to feel a little more informed. They have a little bit more context for what’s happening in the world,” Bigelow says. “And I think knowledge is power.”