House of Dynamite (Photo – Netflix)
“This is insanity.”
“No, this is reality.”
No, this is fiction, but in A House of Dynamite, the new film from Kathryn Bigelow, reality itself is insane, beginning when a missile is launched toward the United States from some unknown adversary.
House of Dynamite
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow – 2025
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan
Whether North Korea, China, or Russia, once the missile is detected over the Pacific, only twenty minutes remain before it hits the American heartland.
Those twenty minutes are stretched to an hour for the audience, as the same twenty minutes are seen from three different perspectives, each ascending in responsibility, from an outlying Alaska communication station to the President of the United States.
The “indeterminate source” of the launch makes a correct response nearly impossible, given the time needed to gather reliable information. When an intercepting missile (“like hitting a bullet with a bullet,” as one expert laments) misses, a “negative impact,” as the monitors disclose, is followed by the ominous announcement: “target remains inbound.” All that remains is the desperate hope that the missile will be a dud.
I found Bigelow’s film to be a throwback to the sixties, when Fail Safe showed the same ratcheting of nuclear tension, and Dr. Strangelove, though satirical, laughed through the apocalypse.
There’s no humor in Bigelow’s film, however, none to break the tension. Only a scene of weekend warriors at a re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg offers a brief respite from the clenched jaws, trembling words, and teary eyes of the various situation rooms grappling with the oncoming missile and its possible scenarios.
How relatively simple, though terrible, was the decision Henry Fonda’s US President made in Fail Safe. Sixty years later, that film seems almost quaint: there were only two nuclear powers, and missile-ready atomic bombs were in their infancy. A House of Dynamite shows a harsher truth: the spread of weapons and their terrifying efficiency make even Fonda’s rational, but horrific, decision obsolete.
Idris Elba plays the President in A House of Dynamite, delivering an impressive acting pivot from a jovial publicity stop at a basketball camp (featuring Angel Reese, no less) to being rapidly brought up to speed on the incoming weapon and trying to make a prudent decision, though there wasn’t one, and perhaps never will be.
I found the ending of the film abrupt, but maybe the end of the world will be too.
> Playing at Landmark Pasadena Playhouse and streaming on Netflix.
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