The Pentagon isn’t happy with new political thriller A House of Dynamite, but director Kathryn Bigelow has hit back, saying: “I just state the truth.”
Netflix thriller A House of Dynamite is one of the most talked about movies of the year right now, due to the film’s divisive ending, as well as its controversial subject matter.
The story concerns a nuclear attack on the US, examining how different strands of government might respond.
A House of Dynamite posits that the current system would be able to stop a nuclear missile 50% of the time – at one point calling it a “coin toss” – and the Pentagon hasn’t taken kindly to that claim. Warning: spoilers ahead!
What the Pentagon has said about A House of Dynamite
During A House of Dynamite, US missile defenses fail to take down a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile heading for Chicago.
Bloomberg has seen a memo that The Pentagon wrote to address “false assumptions” in the film, and “provide correct facts and a better understanding” of how the defense system works.
“The fictional interceptors in the movie miss their target and we understand this is intended to be a compelling part of the drama intended for the entertainment of the audience,” says the memo, before stating that results from testing in the real world “tell a vastly different story.”
The Missile Defense Agency also disputes the “50%” line by claiming that today’s interceptors “have displayed a 100% accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade.”
Kathryn Bigelow responds to Missile Defense Agency criticism
When asked about the controversy, House of Dynamite director Kathryn Bigelow told The Hollywood Reporter that she’s happy her movie is opening up the debate, saying: “In a perfect world, culture has the potential to drive policy – and if there’s dialogue around the proliferation of nuclear weapons, that is music to my ears, certainly.”
Bigelow then compares the movie to her previous features, saying: “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 battledeck 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.”
As for the 50% claim itself, A House of Dynamite screenwriter Noah Oppenheim says: “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% 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 adds: “There’s no way for us to get in the minds of the folks who wrote that memo, but as Kathryn said, both of us are thrilled to see a conversation happening between policymakers and experts about how to make the world a safer place.
“So if the film was a catalyst in some way for that larger conversation and dialogue, that’s one of the reasons why we made it – to trigger that kind of conversation.”
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