Bigelow Defends Nuke Thriller After Pentagon Pushback

Kathryn Bigelow has responded to criticism from the Pentagon regarding her new Netflix film, A House of Dynamite, which dramatizes a failed US response to a nuclear strike. The director is defending the movie's portrayal of missile defense systems. She tells the Hollywood Reporter that her movies, including Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker, are works of fiction but they "lean in hard on realism."

• "I just state the truth. In this piece, it's all about realism and authenticity," Bigelow says. "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."

• In the film, interceptor missiles launched from Alaska fail to stop an attack on Chicago—a scenario the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency disputed in an internal memo, claiming real-world interceptors have had a "100% accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade," the Guardian reports.
• Bigelow, along with screenwriter Noah Oppenheim, pushed back on that assertion, as did outside experts. Nuclear physicist Laura Grego argued that the film's scenario was actually a simplified threat compared to what US defenses might face in reality, noting that no decoys or multiple warheads were involved in the story. "The fictional threat is arguably about as easy as they come," she said.
• Bigelow says she hopes the film sparks dialogue about nuclear weapons and policy, both within government and among the public. "If there's dialogue around the proliferation of nuclear weapons, that is music to my ears," she says. The film, she says, is "grappling with the idea that we're surrounded by 12,000 weapons. We live in a really combustible environment, hence the title—we live in A House of Dynamite."

• The film did not seek Pentagon cooperation in order to maintain independence. "I think it's safe to say that folks who are not currently serving in government are often more free to speak their minds and to give you an accurate picture, as opposed to trying to advance any particular agenda," Oppenheim tells the Reporter. "So relying on folks who recently served in the Pentagon, recently served in our intelligence agencies in the White House—we feel pretty confident in the accuracy of the picture that they gave us.
• The movie has quickly climbed to the top of Netflix's streaming charts, with more than 20 million accounts watching in its first three days. Bigelow attributes the film's popularity to the secrecy and anxiety surrounding the world's nuclear arsenals.