Kathryn Bigelow's Netflix Thriller Heralds The Distressing Return Of A Long-Dormant Hollywood Genre

Since winning Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for "The Hurt Locker," Kathryn Bigelow has established herself as a fearless chronicler of hot button topics. This gets her in trouble sometimes. While she earned her a good deal of critical accolades for the film (including a Best Picture nod), her 2012 docudrama-thriller about the post-9/11 hunt for Osama bin Laden, "Zero Dark Thirty," was taken to task by some reviewers and politicians for appearing to suggest that the United States' enhanced interrogation techniques (aka "torture") proved useful in finding the whereabouts of the al-Qaeda leader. Five years later, she drew fire again for taking an emotionally distant approach to the Detroit Uprising of 1967 in "Detroit."

So, it's probably for the best that Bigelow's latest movie revolves around a hypothetical political incident. Or not. After decades of relative dormancy, Bigelow is angling to jangle every last one of our nerves with the nuclear war thriller "A House of Dynamite." Per the trailer, the film presents a nightmare scenario: a lone intercontinental ballistic missile has been launched by an unknown country, and it's expected to hit Chicago in an hour or so. Bigelow, working from a screenplay by Noah Oppenheimer, games out how our national security apparatus would react to such an attack, and she's assembled a killer cast (which includes Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Tracy Letts, Greta Lee, Jared Harris, and Jason Clarke) to draw us into what the vast majority of critics are calling an almost unbearably tense drama.

As a longtime Bigelow fan, I can't wait to have this master filmmaker work me over. But I'm also distressed that this film is relevant and necessary. We live in a wildly unstable world where the United States, once a beacon of representative democracy on this planet, is being rapidly dismantled by a viciously petty and terminally buffoonish dictator who has a bizarre fascination with giving his country's massive nuclear arsenal a workout. He's even floated the possibility of firing nukes at hurricanes before they make landfall, which, given his administration's gutting of FEMA, seems like it might actually be on the table. You can never tell with Trump, which is a frightening thing to say about a world leader who, with one order, can end civilization.

In other words, here we are, sweating armageddon like it's the 1980s again, when President Ronald Reagan and a variety of Soviet General Secretaries engaged in needless saber rattling. We were so concerned about an imminent nuclear war back then that a string of films were made warning us (and hopefully our leaders) against the planet-destroying toll such a conflict would exact on humanity. The movies were great, but I liked them more when they were museum pieces.

Filmmakers began exploiting nuclear war panic in the 1950s and 1960s. Science-fiction classics like the original 1954 "Godzilla," 1951's "The Day the Earth Stood Still," and "Them!" gave us something to legitimately worry about while dazzling us with giant monsters and alien invasions. There were also deathly serious (and dreadfully depressing) dramas like "On the Beach" and "Fail-Safe," though no film stung the conscience like Stanley Kubrick's dark comedy "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb."

We got distracted a bit by the Vietnam War, but once the United States felt free to puff its chest out again (after Reagan's election), the planet's anxiety once again got fixated squarely on the looming specter of nuclear war. In the span of just over a year (on the heels of the cheery, we-can-stop-the-apocalypse blockbuster "WarGames"), viewers were subjected to three utterly devastating dramas: "The Day After," "Testament," and "Threads." If you want to ruin your day, dial up one of these movies. They crush you in such spectacularly different ways, and I'm hard-pressed to name a favorite. The last time I watched "Testament," I cried non-stop through the last 20 minutes, which is really the only reasonable response to that film. "Threads" is a British docudrama (from the director who would later helm Steve Martin's wonderfully witty rom-com "L.A. Story") that delivers blunt-force radiation trauma, while "The Day After" horrified Reagan into pursuing nuclear deescalation.

I was no older than 10 when I watched all three of these films for the first time, and they hit hard because my parents couldn't convincingly console me. The potential of a nuclear war was a fact of life, and if the missiles left their silos, there was nothing to be done but hope that heaven's not a hoax. Then Gorbachev emerged, our nuclear fever broke and, after a few decades of something resembling stability on this front, we worked our way back to the brink of annihilation.

The world has never been a more dangerous place than it is now, and I think a filmmaker of Bigelow's caliber has a solemn responsibility to hammer this home. The trailer tagline for "A House of Dynamite" warns us that a nuclear attack, which would be the first of its kind since the United States dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, is inevitable. "Not If. When." I used to take comfort in believing that the superpowers were led by, at a certain level, basically rational people who, if nothing else, possessed a self-preservation instinct. I no longer believe this. So, Bigelow's "A House of Dynamite" sounds like a terrifically awful time at the movies. I can't wait?

"A House of Dynamite" begins streaming on Netflix on October 24, 2025.