The Pentagon does not like this.
Photo: Eros Hoagland/Netflix
Director Kathryn Bigelow doesn’t mind that the Pentagon is mad at her movie A House of Dynamite — it means the right people are watching. “In a perfect world, culture has the potential to drive policy,” Bigelow said The Hollywood Reporter on October 29. “And if there’s dialogue around the proliferation of nuclear weapons, that is music to my ears, certainly.” The Missile Defense Agency issued an October 16 internal memo that criticized A House of Dynamite for portraying its nuclear missile defenses as only 50 percent effective, which was then leaked to Bloombergfor an October 25 report. Set in the Pentagon, the film follows government workers who have less than 30 minutes to respond to a nuclear attack before it touches down in Chicago. A House of Dynamite was the No. 1 film on Netflix last week, scoring 22.1 million views, per Deadline. Clearly, the movie is reaching the right people.
“The fictional interceptors in the movie miss their target and we understand this is intended to be a compelling part of the drama intended for the entertainment of the audience,” the Pentagon claimed in the memo, saying that real-world tests “tell a vastly different story.”
So, I know A House of Dynamite teach 22 million Netflix viewers incorrect facts about the US’s missile defense work? Bigelow and her screenwriter Noah Oppenheim stand by their (literal) guns. “We believe all those experts who’ve told us that the system is more like a coin toss like we depict in the film,” Oppenheim told THR. Bigelow and Oppenheim’s research for the film focused on people who recently worked within the government — rather than people who currently do. “As we see it, it’s not a debate between us as filmmakers and the Pentagon,” Oppenheim said. “It’s between the Pentagon and the wider community of experts in space.” Oppenheim also noted that their movie has been called accurate by “Senator Edward Markey or retired general Douglas Lute; journalists like Tom Nichols and Fred Kaplan who’ve covered this issue for decades; (and) the APS, which is a nonpartisan organization of physicists.” Bigelow added to it THR that the movie is “all about realism and authenticity”: “I just state the truth.”
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