"Yet the world in which this explicitly present-day story takes place can sometimes feel oddly retro, as though Bigelow were transporting us back to an age when imagining doomsday scenarios at least came with the comforting assumption that the government officials whose job it is to prevent the worst from happening were all, at some basic level, competent and sane enough to agree on what the worst would be."
"Every character in A House of Dynamite seems to feel the immense moral and historical weight of the choices that have been suddenly thrust upon them, from the overwhelmed and indecisive but fundamentally decent president (Idris Elba), to the wearily pragmatic general serving as his senior military adviser (Tracy Letts), all the way down to the soldier at a remote post in the Pacific (Anthony Ramos) whose team first spots a nuclear missile of unknown origin bound for the American Midwest."
"The script, by Noah Oppenheim, who has worked as a producer of television news as well as a screenwriter, steers clear of creating heroes and villains-an admirably fair-minded approach, but one that nonetheless ends up misrepresenting a key feature of contemporary American reality, which is that, should a real-life scenario like the one in this movie present itself, we would be in the hands of Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump."
Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite is a hyperrealistic political procedural filmed with a documentary-style hand-held camera that immerses the viewer in situation rooms, military outposts, and presidential helicopters. The present-day setting often feels retro, implying an era when officials were assumed competent and sane enough to agree on what constituted the worst. Characters carry moral and historical weight, including an overwhelmed yet fundamentally decent president (Idris Elba), a pragmatic senior military adviser (Tracy Letts), and a Pacific soldier (Anthony Ramos) who first spots a nuclear missile. Noah Oppenheim's script avoids heroes and villains, favoring neutrality that can misrepresent contemporary American crisis stewardship.
Read at Slate Magazine
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