A House Of Dynamite

When an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) of unknown origin is detected heading for Chicago, US government and military officials must decide on the best course of action, while the world teeters on the brink of nuclear war.

There are few directors working today who looooove their military competence porn the way that Kathryn Bigelow does. Between films like Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker, K-19: The Widowmaker, if you give Kathryn Bigelow a story all about governmental systems dedicated to their nations' continuing efforts of imperialism and colonialism, and the labyrinthian hierarchies and ready violence that sustains those systems, she will deliver you some “high speed, low drag” entertainment.

And a House Of Dynamite is more of the same, a tense and perhaps debatably “realistic” portrayal of a nuclear attack scenario that follows U.S. government and military officials as they respond to the appearance of a sudden threat, all as it unfolds basically in real-time, while being told from the multiple perspectives of the people responding to the crisis.

At the same time, A House Of Dynamite is also a warning of sorts, a film about how, no matter how often you train, no matter how much you prepare, constantly keeping the world on the razor’s edge means that sooner or later, you’re gonna slip, and you're gonna get cut deep…

The film opens in Washington, D.C.…

Despite a sleepless night due to a sick child, and some schedule conflicts with her husband when it comes to the kid’s doctor’s appointment, Captain Olivia Walker is just starting her shift as the oversight officer for the White House Situation Room—where she acts as the unblinking eye of American Global Might—when a Pacific-based SBX-1 early-warning radar detects an unidentified intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in flight over the northwest Pacific.

It quickly becomes clear that the ICBM's trajectory means that it is targeting the city of Chicago, and that it will hit its target within the next twenty minutes.

A zoom call quickly ensues, involving the President, the Situation Room, the Pentagon, and a bunch of U.S. Government officials, as the Defense Readiness Condition, or DEFCON, is raised to DEFCON 2. An alert system developed in 1959, the DEFCON system indicates the five levels of military readiness. DEFCON 1 is the highest and most severe, signifying an immediate or ongoing attack on the U.S. or its allies, and the imminent threat of nuclear war. The U.S. has only officially been at DEFCON 2 one time, and that was back during the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. 

The United States Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, orders a unit with the 49th Missile Defense Battalion (MDB) stationed at Fort Greeley, Alaska, under the command of a young Major named Daniel Gonzalez–who is already having a bad day due to an argument over the phone with his girlfriend–to launch two ground-based interceptors (GBI). These are the anti-ballistic missile component of the United States' Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, which was built to protect us against the possibility of ICBM attack. Unfortunately, the first GBI fails to deploy. The second misses the ICBM. This horrifies Gonzalez and his team, and he stumbles outside to vomit, as his team deals with the realization of just how many people are going to die in Chicago, possibly due to an error on their part.

Alertness is raised to DEFCON 1. This has never happened before.

Secretary of Defense Reid Baker initiates the government's continuity of governance protocol, resulting in the evacuation of designated federal employees, including FEMA official Cathy Rogers, who is busy trying to find out whether or not the evacuation alerts to Chicago are real. Meanwhile, Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington rushes to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), and advises the president not to retaliate until they confirm the missile’s origin. With impact only a few minutes away, Captain Walker phones her husband at the doctor’s office, telling him to take their kid and to leave the D.C. area immediately.

Meanwhile, on Offutt Air Force base, south of Omaha, Nebraska, Gen. Anthony Brady, commander of the United States Strategic Command, or STRATCOM, has scrambled B-2 bombers with the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, or INDOPACOM, in preparation for retaliation. Seeing reports that China, Russia, and Iran have begun to mobilize their forces, he recommends immediate worldwide retaliation, citing the possibility that the U.S. may soon not be able to retaliate at all. He presents the president with OPLAN 8010. This is STRATCOM’s primary strategic war plan, a top secret three ring binder filled with a flexible, multi-threat plan meant to guide a president through their various options involving the U.S's myriad of nuclear forces, conventional strikes, missile defense, and non-kinetic capabilities available to him in order for him to decide how best to deter adversaries and/or manage escalation. It’s a very thick three ring binder.

The president is understandably intimidated.

What follows is multiple series of arguments, told from multiple perspectives, mostly over zoom and phone, as a myriad elected dipshits, seasoned bureaucrats, veteran soldiers, and suddenly pressed-into-service experts debate the question of the missile’s origin, the implications of retaliation, of how many lives will be lost, of how may lives might be saved, what their decisions will mean to the future, and how the precarity of nuclear proliferation is akin to living in "a house of dynamite" (DRINK!), and all while the missile in question inexorably arcs over the rim of the planet, and straight towards the mostly unsuspecting populace of Chicago, who are less than half an hour from being almost totally wiped out.

The film ends with the president’s decision still uncertain, while the officials evacuated due to the continuity plan are shown entering the Raven Rock Mountain Complex near Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, and Maj. Gonzalez is shown kneeling helplessly in the gravel outside his station on Fort Greely.

A House Of Dynamite attempts to show us how the world actually does end in a bang after all, but first… there’s zoom meetings.

It’s a movie of three parts, where, at the end of each part, it jumps back to the beginning and covers the same basic ground from another perspective, from the people who give the orders, all the way down to the people who execute them. And overall, it does a good job of giving these people some bare bones real life aspects, just enough for you to understand what drives them in their work, and to heighten the horror of this missile suddenly appearing out of the clear blue sky one day. And it's made all the wrost, because the central question they’re all wrestling with is…

Is this an attack? Or was it an accident?

Because if it is an attack, then that means all gloves are off, and now your only option is to shit your pants, jump in, and swim. But if it was truly an accident, if a system somewhere just broke down, due to age or due to general disrepair, and the worst case happened… does that mean that we just have to accept the 10 million dead in nuclear fire, as well as the resulting fallout, for the sake of the planet’s future? Needless to say… this whole “there but for the grace of God goes us“ scenario is pretty harrowing.

Immediately upon the film’s release, a bunch of armchair Generals basically trampled each other in their rush to quibble over the accuracy of the events of the film. This is pretty par for the course when it comes to American society, as we are a selfish society in general, one that simply refuses to not center themselves in absolutely everything at all times, and all while generally lacking all media literacy, let alone the ability to engage with art in any kind of way, so of course these dipshits don’t get that the point of the film isn’t the accuracy…

It’s that these systems, these professionals... they all fail.

As I said earlier, Kathryn Bigelow loooooves her competence porn, so the people depicted here have been specifically trained to deal with this kind of scenario, they know what they're doing, and yet… they still fall apart, not all, and not completely, but most of them. More than anything else, A House Of Dynamite proves that Yeats was fucking right, I guess.

Even worse, despite the center not holding, these people still all do their jobs. Like I said, it’s still competence porn. No one fucks up here. And yet, it doesn’t work. In the end, the president’s decision is unknown, what happens next is unknown, but one thing is known for certain… Chicago is dead. In the end, these highly-trained people were completely incapable of stopping that. They stepped up when called, they executed, and they fucking whiffed. And that means the whole upper Midwest is fucked too, from the fires, from the destruction, from the fallout. East of there is fucked as well, once the wind starts blowing. And that's not even mentioning the Great Lakes. Canada too. It’s all bad. Despite all the preparations and planning… there’s no good news here, only that some folks might be "lucky" enough to maybe survive the bad news.

Even worse?

If you even want to think about that at this point…

I saw dipshit Blue MAGA asshats out there saying shit like “this could happen under Trump” usually while written over some ugly GenAI garbage those morons made, despite the fact that every use is enriching billionaires, stealing from artists, poisoning entire communities, and destroying the planet, so unsurprisingly, they are also missing the god damn point.

Because the point is that this could happen during any administration. That’s the point. Rogue governments. Fascist Christian white supremacy driven adventurism. Anti-colonialism grudges. Nuclear proliferation. Aging infrastructure. Something like this could happen at any moment, and it’s a coin toss at best that we don’t all die in nuclear fire as a result… the kind of event that would definitely redine the definition of what it means to be considered one of the “lucky" ones.

And the truly scary part?

A lot of the systems depicted in this film, despite having been released this very fucking year, in real life, most of them have been completed dismantled by DOGE and the Trump administration, or are now staffed by skeleton crews, most of which are made up of incompetents, sycophants, and outright Nazis, all while anyone with any actual talent, insight, competency, or expertise have all been silenced or driven off.

Then, consider for a moment what the future looks like, as Trumpers attack institutes of higher learning, and Christians push their mythology into text books, think about what the next generation of AI-dependent, vibe-based "experts" will be like, and watch as that flame of hope gutters.

So, yeah…

But hey... at least the movie was entertaining.