<\/p>\n
When Kathryn Bigelow\u2019s nuclear countdown thriller \u201cA House of Dynamite\u201d premiered at the Venice Film Festival in early September, it was greeted with a chorus of praise. Just about every critic there called the movie tense, dazzling, nail-biting, and rhapsodized over what they saw as Bigelow\u2019s stunning craftsmanship. It was clear to me that I had seen a totally different film<\/a> \u2014 an overheated but \u201cbreathless\u201d piece of doomsday pulp that repeated the same scenario three times (a rogue nuke speeding toward Chicago, where it\u2019s set to drop and explode in 20 minutes), less effectively each time.<\/p>\n To me, \u201cA House of Dynamite\u201d didn\u2019t feel at all <\/em>like it was directed by the commanding filmmaker of \u201cZero Dark Thirty\u201d and \u201cThe Hurt Locker.\u201d This one felt like hyped-up TV, with too much caffeinated camera jitter, too many unconvincing but in-your-face \u201cquotidian\u201d moments, and too much hambone acting (I\u2019ve never seen Jared Harris, who plays the Secretary of Defense, give this bluntly overstated a performance). The film felt to me like a schlock disaster movie taking itself seriously.<\/p>\n More from Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n But that last element \u2014 the fact that it does<\/em> take itself seriously \u2014 turned out to be the bait that hooked the critics. What the reviews I read, and the people I had conversations with, all seemed to be saying is that \u201cA House of Dynamite\u201d was a movie they watched with white knuckles, heart in the throat, and a prolonged spasm of dread because the film hit them with the force of a cathartic reality check. They hadn\u2019t thought about the possibility of nuclear war in a long time. And this movie did more than just make you think about it. It demonstrated that the possibility was far more likely than any of us want to believe.<\/p>\n But does the movie, in fact, demonstrate that? Or does it merely assert <\/em>it, with no evidence and with a scenario that strains belief because it makes almost no sense even on its own hair-trigger terms?<\/p>\n If you come out of \u201cA House of Dynamite\u201d thinking that a nuclear conflagration could be just around the corner, and that this is the movie that pulled the wool off your eyes, you could say that that makes it, by definition, an effective movie. But what I actually think that makes it is an exploitation film. \u201cA House of Dynamite\u201d works hard to churn up our anxieties, yet it does so more or less the same way the disaster films of the \u201970s did: by serving up a sum-of-all-fears cataclysm as if it were \u201creality.\u201d<\/p>\n The film\u2019s nugget of apocalyptic narrative, which gets no more illuminated each time it\u2019s retold, comes down to this: The rogue nuke, launched by we-have-no-idea-who, is rocketing toward the U.S., and despite all our advanced military defense systems there is no way to stop it<\/em>. This, the film claims, is the real<\/em> reality, the one that the powers that be want you to forget. The film suggests that our defense systems amount to a kind of Ponzi scheme, that the government has created a grand illusion of national security. But now, at last, watching this movie, the truth can be told: that it\u2019s all 10 times more precarious than we thought. Sweet dreams!<\/p>\n Bigelow and her screenwriter, Noah Oppenheim, claim to have done their research and gotten the inside scoop on what a dangerous, scattershot, combustible world we\u2019ve all fooling ourselves into believing we don\u2019t live in. Bigelow used a retired three-star general as a consultant but, in general, stayed away from the Pentagon, refusing to seek its endorsement. She wanted to break free of the official bureaucratic party line. Okay, fair enough. But regardless of whether the film\u2019s scenario is accurate, I\u2019d be more satisfied than not if it simply felt<\/em> accurate. Why doesn\u2019t it? That comes down to how its key probability factor is totally at war with its central metaphor.<\/p>\n Let me explain. In the first episode, we expect that U.S. missiles will be able to zap that rogue nuke right out of the sky. But what we learn \u2014 and what everyone in the White House Situation Room learns too, since it appears they\u2019re as clueless as we are \u2014 is that the chances of a GBI (Ground-Based Interceptor) taking out that nuke are just 61 percent. This causes Harris\u2019s Secretary of Defense to exclaim, \u201cSo it\u2019s a fucking coin toss? This is what $50 billion buys us?\u201d <\/em>That\u2019s quite a statement for the film to make, and it\u2019s meant to leave us spooked.<\/p>\n But if that\u2019s the reality, consider this. The film\u2019s second episode, in which the characters try (without success) to figure out who launched the attack, is entitled \u201cA Bullet Hitting a Bullet.\u201d That sounds like some sort of poetic fancy, but in the course of the episode the phrase is used, quite specifically, to explain why our missile defense systems are so much less effective than you or I think. The film asserts that if a rogue nuke were speeding toward Chicago, the chances that one of our missiles could knock it out of the sky would be comparable to the chances of a bullet hitting a bullet.<\/p>\n To laymen, that image kind of makes sense. A nuke fired at the U.S. would be traveling really fast<\/em> (like a bullet). A missile launched to neutralize that nuke would also be traveling really fast<\/em> (like a bullet). So one bullet would have to hit the other bullet. Pretend that someone was shooting a gun and trying to do that. What are the chances of a bullet hitting a bullet? I\u2019d say close to zero.<\/p>\n But wait a minute. I thought the movie just told us that the chances of success in this situation are 61 percent. (Not 60 or 62 percent. 61<\/em>.) That isn\u2019t the greatest of odds, but it\u2019s not the worst either. Yet now the movie is telling us that the odds of success are virtually nil. So which is it? A fucking coin toss\u2026or a bullet hitting a bullet? Do you see how little \u201cA House of Dynamite\u201d adds up? Besides, I\u2019m no expert, but that\u2019s not how heat-seeking missiles work.<\/p>\n There have been great movies built around the looming hair-trigger prospect of a nuclear attack. \u201cDr. Strangelove\u201d is, of course, a visionary comedy, yet it\u2019s framed as a grandly ominous countdown-to-the-apocalypse. \u201cFail Safe,\u201d the great Sidney Lumet nuclear thriller, came out the same year as \u201cDr. Strangelove\u201d (1964), only nine months later, and in many ways it\u2019s an even more spellbinding movie. And 25 years ago, the historical political drama \u201cThirteen Days,\u201d set mostly in the Oval Office (with a definitive performance by Bruce Greenwood as JFK), portrayed the inner workings of the Cuban Missile Crisis with a riveting psychology and an inside realpolitik that was hypnotic to behold. The film showed us just how close we came (much closer than was acknowledged at the time, or for years afterward).<\/p>\n Those three movies are all, in their different ways, fearless cautionary works of art. But \u201cA House of Dynamite\u201d is so hyperbolic about pushing the alarm button, all in order to push our buttons, that the most dangerous possibility raised by the movie is that anyone would actually fall for it.<\/p>\n Best of Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Kathryn Bigelow\u2019s nuclear countdown thriller \u201cA House of Dynamite\u201d premiered at the Venice Film Festival in early September, it was greeted with a chorus of praise. Just about every critic there called the movie tense, dazzling, nail-biting, and rhapsodized over what they saw as Bigelow\u2019s stunning craftsmanship. It was clear to me that I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2100394,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[381865,397036,348549,353965,397035,333428,22893],"class_list":["post-2100393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-a-house-of-dynamite","tag-exploitation-film","tag-jared-harris","tag-kathryn-bigelow","tag-nuclear-war","tag-venice-film-festival","tag-white-house"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/\u2018A-House-of-Dynamite-Is-a-Fear-Stoking-Nuclear-Exploitation-Film.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2100393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2100393"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2100393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2100395,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2100393\/revisions\/2100395"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2100394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2100393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2100393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2100393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}