'A House of Dynamite': Do It Again.

Kurt Loder
Thu, 16 Oct 2025 21:00:00 -0700
Lifestyle

Although it's packed to the gills with fine actors — among them Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Tracy Letts and Jared Harris — the true star of "A House of Dynamite," the new Kathryn Bigelow movie, is the gush of tech talk and military war-speak that propels it forward, and stands in for a story. Since Bigelow is a master action filmmaker, this Netflix project carries you along at first, holding your attention on the plot's animating event, which is that somebody — some unknown entity — has fired a nuclear weapon at the United States. And it's headed for Chicago. And it's 19 minutes away. Wait, strike that: 18 minutes. What can be done?

Nothing, unhappily. America's gazillion-dollar missile defense system, as invulnerable as it's long been promised to be, is still operated by stupid humans. So ... strike that, too.

But let's think this through. "If it's just Chicago, it's just Chicago," says a professionally callous security staffer dropping knowledge for us in a control room. "But if we fire back ..."
Updated: Fri Oct 17, 2025

Although it's packed to the gills with fine actors — among them Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Tracy Letts and Jared Harris — the true star of "A House of Dynamite," the new Kathryn Bigelow movie, is the gush of tech talk and military war-speak that propels it forward, and stands in for a story. Since Bigelow is a master action filmmaker, this Netflix project carries you along at first, holding your attention on the plot's animating event, which is that somebody — some unknown entity — has fired a nuclear weapon at the United States. And it's headed for Chicago. And it's 19 minutes away. Wait, strike that: 18 minutes. What can be done?

Nothing, unhappily. America's gazillion-dollar missile defense system, as invulnerable as it's long been promised to be, is still operated by stupid humans. So ... strike that, too.

But let's think this through. "If it's just Chicago, it's just Chicago," says a professionally callous security staffer dropping knowledge for us in a control room. "But if we fire back ..."

Exactly. If we fire back and some other world superpower gets spooked — Russia, say; or North Korea; maybe even Iran (had the filmmakers cast the Islamic Republic as their lunatic baddies it might have given the movie some up-to-date bite) — we could find ourselves facing nuclear Armageddon from a different direction.

"I'd accept the loss of 10 million Americans," says a deceptively soft-spoken general-slash-war pig played by Letts, "if we could be certain it would end there." Fat chance of that. Because while the Cold War doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" — MAD — served to rein in military passions in the age of the atom, now — as the movie flatly asserts over its opening images — there is no longer any such spirit of international restraint.

Although "A House of Dynamite" poses as an urgent message to complacent Americans, it is in fact a familiar reformulation of the nuclear-thriller films of the early 1960s — "Fail Safe," "Seven Days in May," even Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove," which parodied the genre. (This movie is like "Strangelove" without the laughs.)

In the picture's classic manner, we once again find ourselves in war rooms stacked with ticking tech hardware, as well as snow-blown defense outposts like Alaska's Fort Greely and the even farther-away Indo-Pacific Command, which is located in a place of palm trees. We follow the flawed characters as they take their eyes off the onrushing missile to tend instead to their touching mortal concerns. Captain Olivia Walker (Ferguson), who presides over the White House Situation Room (propping up a lily-livered superior played by Jason Clarke), is preoccupied with locating her husband and son, who are at a doctor appointment. The secretary of defense (Harris) is desperately concerned with the well-being of his daughter (Kaitlyn Dever), who has the misfortune to live in Chicago. And the president of the United States (Idris Elba) is burning through satphone batteries to connect with his wife (Renee Elise Goldsberry), who is on safari in Kenya, as one sometimes is. (Even more unusually, the president finds room in his schedule for a speech-making visit to a professional basketball game, where we are treated to a brief cameo by WNBA irritant Angel Reese — a new species of product placement.)

The movie's biggest problem, apart from its letdown ending (no calls were put in to Roland Emmerich for pyro advice for this movie), is its annoying tripartite structure. The first third of the film takes us through the story's basic action; then the second and third parts lead us through it again, from different points of view. Responsibility for this awkward narrative strategy lies with writer Noah Oppenheim, who also wrote Pablo Larrain's sedate 2016 Kennedy biopic "Jackie." It's a shame that an Oscar-winning director like Bigelow — who somehow hasn't made a feature film in eight years — has to downsize her vision to be allowed a quasi-comeback like this.