Film Review: A House of Dynamite 

A House of Dynamite
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
First Light, Prologue Entertainment, Kingsgate Films
Streaming on Netflix: 10.24.2025

As a child of the Reagan era, I remember the tension of the Cold War and the constant, looming threat of nuclear armageddon all too well. I remember feeling so helpless because I was only a kid, and trying to trust that in the event of the unthoughtful, the grown ups would know what to do. As I watched Kathryn Bigelow’s doomsday thriller A House of Dynamite, I found it very hard to feel any sense of tension, simply because the movie took place in a world where at least the adults were still in charge.

A House of Dynamite is a political thriller unfolding over a single, harrowing half hour in Washington, D.C. When sensors detect a mysterious missile launched from the Pacific and heading toward the American Midwest, the White House Situation Room scrambles to identify its origin anddecide how to respond. The story is told from three different perspectives. The first follows Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation) and Admiral Mark Miller (Jason Clarke, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Chappaquiddick) in the White House Situation Room, when the missile is first detected, and the team scrambles for verification as communication with senior leaders begins to break down and communication lines collapse. The second begins with Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos, In The Heights) and his missile-interceptor team at the Alaska Defense Installation, who must act on incomplete orders while the system meant to stop the incoming threat starts to fail. Secretary of Defense Reid Baker (Jared Harris, Chernobyl, Foundation) struggles to regain control, and a frantic deputy (Gabriel Basso, Super 8, Hillbilly Elegy) races to prevent escalation. The third and final perspective is that of The Presidential Detail, as the POTUS (Idris Elba, Pacific Rim, The Suicide Squad) is abruptly pulled from a public event and whisked to safety with a young naval aide, Lt. Cmdr Robert Reeves (Jonah Hauer-King, The Little Mermaid, I Know What You Did Last Summer). Cut off from data and advisers, POTUS faces the impossible choice between swift and decisive retaliation and cautious, hopeful restraint.

Bigelow brings her usual eye for detail and sense of realism to the proceedings. Despite the style being a bit too clearly derivative of Paul Greengrass (The Bourne series, The Lost Bus), A House of Dynamite is a very well directed and expertly edited film. The pacing allows the tension to build slowly but steadily, and the screenplay by former President of NBC news Noah Oppenheim is smartly structured and does a deft job of balancing keeping things accessible without talking down to the audience. However, part of the reason it’s so easy to follow is that while we’ve never seen it done quite this way, there’s nothing in this movie that we haven’t seen before. Movies ranging from Fail Safe to The Sum of All Fears have covered all of this ground before, albeit in a much more Hollywoodized kind of way (there’s even a moment of designated survivors retreating to a community bunker that felt oddly reminiscent of Deep Impact). The mid section can’t avoid feeling like a Tom Clancy movie, with Basso’s character serving as the Jack Ryan equivalent. Between the fact that the character made me think of Jack Ryan and

the actor made me think of JD Vance, I felt more nostalgic for simpler times when existential threats made some degree of sense than I did scared about the plausibility of the scenario. It really isn’t my intention to turn this review into a cheap excuse for Trump-bashing, but seeing the same week of Pete Hegseth’s meeting with military brass, and not long after the Tylenol announcement, it was simply impossible not to feel constantly distracted by the feeling that each of these actors probably learned enough in their research for these roles to put them at the very least on level ground with the current confederacy of dunces running the show. What’s meant to feel urgent and starkly real feels oddly quaint and reassuring. Yes, the unthinkable is happening, and the leader of the free world faces an impossible choice. Still, it actually is the free world, run by a POTUS rather than a POS. I felt so strangely soothed by it all that I wanted to ask George to tell me about the rabbits. 

A House of Dynamite is a good film that is severely hampered by coming at a time when the world is stranger and scarier than doomsday fiction. I can’t say it would be a genuinely great film had it come in a different year, but at least it would have played as the movie it’s supposed to be. It would play as a very good one, but cinema is shaped by and shapes the times in which we live, and this one simply doesn’t take place in that time. In the bizarre Twilight Zone alternate reality in which we find ourselves, despite a strong cast and stellar filmmaking craftsmanship, for me at least, this story of a missile on a collision course with destiny was simply too far off target to strike with any real force. —Patrick Gibbs 

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