Netflix audiences were finally treated to the first Kathryn Bigelow movie in years as she returned to the military thriller genre with “A House of Dynamite” after giving us efforts like “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” those features showcasing the sacrifices made by those serving in American forces, and even the folks behind the scenes with intelligence collection, who also dedicate their lives to public service/protection.
Bigelow and her screenwriter, Noah Oppenheim, have publicly responded (via The Hollywood Reporter) to recent criticisms from The Pentagon after the film spotlighted the “coin-flip” aspect of defense systems and interceptor missiles, which are designed to knock out incoming and speeding ballistic missiles (with or without nuclear payloads), as referred to in the film, it’s “a bullet trying to hit a bullet.” The Pentagon countered by claiming that the system has “displayed a 100 percent accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade.”
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Bigelow stated in the new interview about those complaints by the Pentagon, “It’s the best course of action to consult with all of the experts that we did. We had extraordinary tech advisors on this film, and then they were our North Star…I just state the truth. In this piece, it’s all about realism and authenticity. Same with ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ and same with ‘Hurt Locker,’ even though Hurt Locker was obviously a work of fiction, and this is a work of fiction. For me, these are pieces that lean in hard on realism. You’re inviting an audience into, say, the battle deck of STRATCOM. That’s a place that’s not easily accessible, and so you want it to be authentic and honest. That’s my goal, and I think we achieved it…To be honest, nuclear weapons have been shrouded in silence for several decades now. It’s my opinion that this was a conversation that needed to happen.”
“As we see it, it’s not a debate between us as filmmakers and the Pentagon. It’s between the Pentagon and the wider community of experts in the space. Senator Edward Markey or retired general Douglas Lute; journalists like Tom Nichols and Fred Kaplan who’ve covered this issue for decades; the APS, which is a nonpartisan organization of physicists — these are the folks who are coming out and saying what we depict in the film, which is that our current missile defense system is highly imperfect, is accurate. On the other side of that conversation, you have the Pentagon apparently asserting that it’s 100 percent effective. We believe all those experts who’ve told us that the system is more like a coin toss, like we depict in the film, but we’re glad all these folks are having the debate and the conversation,” Oppenheim (a former journalist himself) said while citing the experts they spoke with that shared that perspective on America’s readiness to respond to incoming threats.
Think what you’d like about the film itself, performances, and the execution, but these folks did their research and tried their best to relay the sad truth of human error being a huge threat. Along with the fact that nobody “wins” in nuclear wars or battles (the mutual assured destruction, aka M.A.D., of it all), when we’re talking about millions and potentially billions of lives being in harm’s way. No matter your political affiliations, you should be aware of the costs of exchanging these devastating weapons, also, the reliability of the billion-dollar systems in place designed to protect the population.
That all said, you can read The Playlist’s review of the pic from our Venice Film Festival coverage here and a recent chat with Oppenheim here as well on The Discourse Podcast.
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