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Outposters of a certain age remember the heights of the Cold War. Although it seems almost touchingly naive and hilarious now, Duck & Cover and Protect & Survive were the go-to instructions from governments. Painting windows white, leaving doors open to allow the blast through, and makeshift shelters fashioned from internal doors and cushions were the big plan! Memories of this helped Kathryn Bigelow make House Of Dynamite.
Back in the late 70s and early 80s, a collective of Hawks across the West seemed to convince themselves that a nuclear war wouldn’t be so bad. This led to productions like The War Game, The Day After, and all-time bowel-loosener Threads to prove that it really, really would.
Back then, we all knew of the 4 to 11-minute warning (depending on where you lived), and it seemed possible that life as we knew it could end after a siren and a big flash of light.
I still have vivid memories of one Thursday evening, 9th November, when my Dad ushered me in front of the TV and told me to watch the news with him as something important was happening, and we watched the Berlin Wall fall, bringing it all to an end. Kids today won’t believe us when we tell them.
Bigelow wants to bring back that fear-filled Cold War vibe with House of Dynamite. The movie is finished, and will premiere at the Venice Film Festival in just a few days. So far it has been shrouded in a bit of secrecy with nothing outside a short synopsis. No trailer. No poster. Nothing.
The Zero Dark Thirty and Point Break director has a statement on the movie listing for Venice, and it says this:
“I grew up in an era when hiding under your school desk was considered the go-to protocol for surviving an atomic bomb. It seems absurd now – and it was – but at the time, the threat felt so immediate that such measures were taken seriously.
Today, the danger has only escalated. Multiple nations possess enough nuclear weapons to end civilisation within minutes. And yet, there’s a kind of collective numbness – a quiet normalisation of the unthinkable.
How can we call this ‘defense’ when the inevitable outcome is total destruction? I wanted to make a film that confronts this paradox – to explore the madness of a world that lives under the constant shadow of annihilation, yet rarely speaks of it.”
House of Dynamite stars Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Greta Lee, Anthony Ramos, Tracy Letts, Jason Clarke, Kaitlyn Dever, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Moses Ingram, Brian Tee, Jonah Hauer-King, and Kyle Allen.
It is written by Noah Oppenheim (Jackie) and follows the White House response, in real time, to incoming ICBM’s aimed at the United States. The Netflix production will have a limited theatrical run before landing on the streamer on October 24th.
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