Last year, Oppenheimertook home best picture for its depiction of the genesis of the United States’ nuclear program. This year, Kathryn Bigelow’s A House Of Dynamite imagines its end. “I always thought just being ready is the point,” Idris Elba’s character says in the film’s new trailer. “It keeps people in check, keeps the world straight. If they see how prepared we are, no one starts a nuclear war.” As you can probably imagine, that’s not what happens.
The rest of the trailer watches as a group of high-level government officials—including characters played by Rebecca Ferguson and Jason Clarke—panic and scramble as an intercontinental ballistic missile heads straight for the continental United States. At one point, someone remarks that they’ve never seen the military readiness condition set to DEFCON 2 (near nuclear war) before. Later, Gabriel Basso’s character remarks that diverting the missile is like “hitting a bullet with a bullet.” The situation is very grim.
“These are dedicated professionals at the highest level of government being called on to make impossible decisions in the most extreme circumstances imaginable, which is almost scarier in a way,” Bigelow—who said she sees this film as part of an unofficial triptych including The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty—told Tudum. “I wanted the view of the film to be trained inward, not outward, and for the audience to lean into the ambiguity at the heart of the nuclear debate: How can we call this defense when the outcome could well be total destruction? The antagonist is the system we’ve built to essentially end the world on a hair trigger.”
