Donald Trump’s recent decision to resume nuclear weapons testing, which he blithely announced on his Truth Social platform, marks a dangerous new step toward nuclear catastrophe. Driven by an intractable economic crisis and desperate to maintain its domination over the globe, the American ruling elite is now planning a conflict that policymakers had for decades considered unthinkable.
In this context, the release of director Kathryn Bigelow’s new film A House of Dynamite (2025) on Netflix has objective significance. It is not an entirely praiseworthy effort. In fact, it has quite negative features. The film imagines an ICBM launched by one of America’s “enemies,” presumably North Korea. This is the world turned upside down. The US imperialist military is the most provocative, aggressive, murderous such force on the planet. It has bombed, invaded and destroyed entire nations and regions in recent decades on the basis of blatant lies, resulting in the deaths of millions. The picture of the US as an innocent victim of an “unprovoked” missile attack is fanciful and creates artistic and political problems that never go away throughout the course of the film.
However, if one is prepared to suspend one’s disbelief to an extent, A House of Dynamite has genuine value in evoking the horrifying threat of nuclear warfare and depicting, in a plausibly accurate way, the system through which the United States political-military apparatus would decide whether to use weapons of mass destruction. This system includes the protocol for maintaining continuity of government, involving the evacuation of high-ranking officials to an underground bunker in Raven Rock, Pennsylvania.
In Bigelow’s film, as noted, a nuclear missile is launched over the Pacific Ocean. The US military fails to detect the launch, which is initially thought to be a routine test, and the government responsible for it is unclear. Counter to expectations, the missile enters low orbit along a trajectory eventually determined to be targeting Chicago. Impact is estimated to be only 20 minutes away. Two ground-based interceptors fail to stop the missile, spelling the certain destruction of America’s third-largest city and the death of more than 10 million people.
The US government and military are disorganized and unready. The soldiers who launch the ground-based interceptors are not much older than high school students. The Situation Room’s attempts to communicate with world leaders are thwarted by busy phone lines. The national security adviser is inexplicably unavailable, and his deputy joins an emergency video conference while sprinting toward the White House. The president (Idris Elba) admits he’s unprepared for this situation. Many of these circumstances are all too believable.
Having spoken quickly to Russian officials, the deputy national security adviser urges the president to show restraint. The head of US Strategic Command (Tracy Letts), however, calls for immediate retaliation. The president confirms his nuclear command authority, but we do not learn his decision.
At one point, in one of the film’s more unnerving moments, a top military official asserts to the president:
These are the circumstances. In little more than seven minutes, we will lose the city of Chicago. I can’t tell you why. Or why we’re seeing North Korea, Russia, China, Pakistan, and even Iran raising their alerts and mobilizing their forces across air, land, and sea. Perhaps … they are simply and innocently responding to our posture. It is also possible that they’ve seen our homeland is about to absorb a catastrophic blow, and they are readying to take advantage of that. Or this is all part of a phased, coordinated assault, with far worse to come. I simply don’t know. What I do know is this. If we do not take steps to neutralize our enemies now, we will lose our window to do so. We can strike preemptively, or risk 100 ICBMs launching our way, at which time, this war will have already been lost.
At another point, the same general observes:
We’ve already lost one American city today. How many more do you wanna risk?
President: What kind of question is that? This is insanity, okay?
General: No, sir. This is reality.
The strongest portion of A House of Dynamite is the final one, in which the president, en route to his underground hiding place, is offered by his adviser a “menu” of possible retaliatory scenarios, all of them clearly involving the deaths of millions or tens of millions of human beings. The utter “insanity” of the situation comes home most sharply and disturbingly at this point. This sequence seems the most heartfelt and sincere.
Bigelow’s film begins with a title reading, “At the end of the Cold War, global powers reached the consensus that the world would be better off with fewer nuclear weapons. That era is now over.” The story that subsequently unfolds reveals the chilling implications of the imperialist powers’ shrugging off of all restraints in pursuit of a modernized nuclear arsenal. But does A House of Dynamite truly criticize US nuclear policy?
Its plot revolves around an unexpected nuclear strike against the US by an unknown enemy. This unrealistic scenario is the official justification for the massive American nuclear program, which Barack Obama and his successors have modernized and expanded. In reality, the US maintains its nuclear arsenal as a threat against all adversaries who dare to defy its demands. The US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—an unparalleled war crime—not out of military necessity but to intimidate the Soviet Union and establish American dominance in the postwar period. Today, the US Department of Defense labels China a “pacing challenge,” and recent administrations have revised classified US guidance on the use of nuclear weapons.
A House of Dynamite is similarly uncritical of the continuity of governance procedure that it shows (initiated here by the secretary of defense). This procedure aims to preserve the existence and reign of the American ruling elite domestically and internationally. It can be invoked by the president at any time, should he or she choose to launch a nuclear war. The film shows that decisions that could lead to the extinction of humanity can be made by a mere handful of people. Yet it does not actively protest this situation, depicting it instead as a hard truth.
The fatalistic and passive worship of the accomplished fact (and hence existing institutions), ultimately traceable back to her days in the “postmodern” New York art scene of the 1970s, is a common thread in Bigelow’s films. In Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Bigelow collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency to produce a film, based on falsifications of fact, about the hunting and assassination of Osama bin Laden. It justifies torture and the violation of basic constitutional principles. Similarly, The Hurt Locker (2008), written by an embedded journalist in Iraq, celebrates a “warrior mentality,” accepts without question the second US war on that country and dehumanizes the Iraqi population.
Although Bigelow did not consult the Pentagon while making A House of Dynamite, she nevertheless collaborated with several technical advisers who had worked there. Significantly, the Pentagon has objected that the film underestimates US missile defense capabilities. It claims that tests have shown current interceptors to be 100 percent accurate—an assertion that Laura Grego, an expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, disputes. The Pentagon’s criticism shows the government’s acute sensitivity, in the context of mass opposition to US-sponsored genocide and war, to any suggestion that the American military is fallible.
Despite its unflattering depiction of US missile defense, and notwithstanding the dread and terror of nuclear war that it evokes, the film is weak in important respects. The story, for example, is repeated several times from various perspectives, but each retelling provides little new information. The repetition may tend to dull the emotional impact of the nuclear attack on the viewer.
As usual with Bigelow, the characters are notably thin; none is significantly developed. Moreover, the various government officials are shown as people with heavy responsibilities who are essentially honest and mean well. There is no examination of the state they serve, no hint of social analysis and little historical context to the story.
By drawing attention to and making palpable the threat of nuclear war, A House of Dynamite performs a welcome service. Nevertheless, Bigelow has not abandoned her defense of (and fascination with) the state and its armed forces. The appearance of this film may portend the emergence of more serious, angry and oppositional work from other artists.