The world ends this weekend in director Kathryn Bigelow’s sizzling nuclear nightmare scenario A House of Dynamite. After limited theatrical release, the political thriller arrives on Netflix in time to add some real-life scares to your Halloween holidays.
Idris Elba as the President in “A House of Dynamite.”
Source: Netflix
Kathryn Bigelow’s A House Of Dynamite By The Numbers
A House of Dynamite stars an impressive ensemble cast including Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Greta Lee, Gabriel Basso, Kaitlyn Dever, and Angel Reese.
The film’s limited release was short enough it didn’t do any significant numbers, but that wasn’t the point. It qualifies for awards consideration and earned its theatrical release bonafides, and joins Roofman (read my review here) and One Battle After Another (read my review here) on the shortlist of films lining up for award consideration.
Netflix releases like Roma, The Power of the Dog, All Quiet On the Western Front, Beasts of No Nation, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and Mudbound, as well as other streamers’ productions including CODA (Apple), Everything Everywhere All At Once (Amazon), Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple), and Sound of Metal (Amazon), have thankfully put an end to silly claims that streaming movies “aren’t real cinema,” but some theatrical screening period is of course required.
Besides landing Oscar-worthy (including Best Picture-worthy) productions, Netflix has a second tier of terrific films that aren’t on that elite tier like Roma and Beasts of No Nation, but which still get award talk and are great high-quality entertainment everybody should see – it’s the difference between an A+, an A, and an A-.
I’d rank the excellent films The Harder They Fall, Leave the World Behind, They Cloned Tyrone, The Irishman, Okja, Marriage Story, and Tick, Tick… Boom! as earning either A or A- grades, for example. Some of those got award nominations, too. And that’s still a tier of films any studio would be happy and lucky to have.
The success of such prestige filmmaking has helped further improve the dominance of Netflix and continues building their huge back catalogue for subscribers. We’ll see how much A House of Dynamite builds Netflix’s viewership and award season chances soon, with my personal view that it is probably in the race for a few awards while overall I think it’s an excellent entry in Netflix’s A grade tier.
Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite – The Review
A House of Dynamite is helmed by twice-nominated Oscar winning director Bigelow, whose top-tier work includes the iconic and smart 1991 action flick Point Break, 2008 Best Picture and Best Director winner The Hurt Locker, the decade-defining Zero Dark Thirty in 2012, and 2017’s brilliant and criminally underappreciated Detroit.
Bigelow’s 17-year run of four films from 2008 through 2025 of The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, Detroit, and A House of Dynamite is one of the best of any modern filmmaker. Compare Bigelow’s filmography to Christopher Nolan’s films during the same period — The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet, and Oppenheimer. Bigelow’s films deserve every bit as much praise as Nolan’s films (which I also mostly love or like very much).
I would argue that Bigelow’s films tend to ask complex questions and force us to examine brutal truths about ourselves and our society, which is often controversial and leads to varied (and, in some cases I’d say mistaken) interpretations. But always, Bigelow’s films ask us to question what our history and present reality say about us and our future.
Events like those depicted in A House of Dynamite could occur at any moment, ending our entire civilization in less than an hour. What sort of world, what sort of leadership, do we want at a moment like that, when every second counts and rational judgment based on facts and moral leadership are the only things that can save us from extinction? This isn’t a question we can afford to ignore, because it’s a question that confronts each and every one of us now.
There are comparisons to be made to Annie Jacobsen’s best selling 2024 novel Nuclear War: A Scenario, including the premise of an ICBM launched in a surprise attack and real-time portrayal of how our government deals with the crisis, and whether other nations misinterpret the situation or otherwise decide to fire their nuclear arsenals.
Both stories build tension slowly, with a ticking clock for characters and audience to experience the end of our world together. Jacobsen’s book provides an inspection of the nuts and bolts of nuclear war and how easily it could happen, with excellent historical background tying it all together in context. A House of Dynamite succeeds at conceptualizing events from a human perspective, introducing characters in their private lives first, making it more emotionally accessible and immersive, and tracking their perspectives during the same period of time, each retelling filling in more details.
Those details are human, from their private personal lives to their reactions to each escalating horror of the situation, to their final moments and choices in facing what comes next.
As a procedural, Bigelow’s film mostly plays out in secure rooms, government offices, or en route via car or helicopter to one of those places. There is, occasionally, some walking involved. Never are these relatively ordinary people forced to become action heroes, to run for their lives and leap just in time to avoid a nuclear blast, or to rescue family at the last minute. There are just people doing their jobs, living their lives, suddenly forced to play their little roles in a fumbling process with too little time to save the world.
This means there are a lot of people having conversations, relaying information to other people, and then having phone calls or video conferences to talk about the information with still more people. Because we’re watching it in the rooms where it happens, as it were, everybody involved is at work and spend most of their time trying to figuring out what’s happening and doing their jobs depending on the answer, so we see their emotions and personal responses to the reality of the crisis suppressed and broken into fragments, as would truly be the case.
The world falls apart, but you don’t have time for that right now. Unless you do, and we see some of what that looks like, too. Characters’ relatively minuscule personal problems and concerns become tiny life preservers you cling to for some semblance of humanity while the world makes the clockwork choice to end itself.
No, not the world. People, human beings, make the choice. But people in a system designed by people to make destroying the world easy, and to filter out anybody who might make it harder or slow it down when the moment arrives.
This is the banality of apocalypse. Everyone terrified and unprepared no matter how much they did or didn’t train for it, yet still doing their jobs because they can’t process what’s happening, because what else can you do when you’re literally watching a clock count down to the end of the world? Nobody has an answer to that question, although they desperately look around the room hoping someone does.
Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite tells us the final hour of civilization will be confusing, clouded by emotion and fear, lacking adequate information or time to make a rational choice. Which is precisely why the choices are all conveniently figured out beforehand. And the trouble is, all of those choices are in a Black Book of nuclear launch orders.