For almost as long as there have been nuclear weapons, there have been movies agonizing about the tortured class of professionals tasked with managing them.

Most famously, 1964 saw the twin-premised films Fail Safe and its more famous cousin, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Both depict U.S. decisionmakers reacting to a fictional nuclear accident in which an unauthorized U.S. missile is headed toward the Soviet Union, unable to be recalled, leaving decisionmakers to fret about how to negotiate, preempt, or retaliate their way out of total nuclear annihilation. Whereas Fail Safe portrayed all of this in sober, earnest terms as serious men doing serious work, Strangelove is a spiraling satire of psychosexual absurdity that paints everyone involved as either ridiculous or insane.

For almost as long as there have been nuclear weapons, there have been movies agonizing about the tortured class of professionals tasked with managing them.

Most famously, 1964 saw the twin-premised films Fail Safe and its more famous cousin, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Both depict U.S. decisionmakers reacting to a fictional nuclear accident in which an unauthorized U.S. missile is headed toward the Soviet Union, unable to be recalled, leaving decisionmakers to fret about how to negotiate, preempt, or retaliate their way out of total nuclear annihilation. Whereas Fail Safe portrayed all of this in sober, earnest terms as serious men doing serious work, Strangelove is a spiraling satire of psychosexual absurdity that paints everyone involved as either ridiculous or insane.

A terrifying new film from Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow, A House of Dynamite, dissects a modern-day nuclear crisis—in which a single intercontinental ballistic missile is heading toward the Midwest from an unknown, unattributed source in the Pacific. But while this scenario is good nightmare fodder, the movie limits itself to generating suspense without aspiring to say something that truly provokes.

Six decades on from Strangelove, as the United States finds itself with few new ideas for how to contend with the world’s most dangerous weapons, it seems the film industry has few new ideas for how to depict them.

Scene in the War Room from the film Dr. Strangelove, 1964.Columbia Pictures via Getty Images

Even though much has changed since those early days of the Cold War, the premise of A House of Dynamite is similar to that of Fail Safe or Strangelove. There are new members in the nuclear club, new delivery systems, new international treaties and domestic doctrines. What feels most different about this world is the unprecedented array of intelligence and communication tools available to decisionmakers. With the benefit of instant, simultaneous collaboration in the United States’ competent, highly professionalized governmental and military workforce, there aren’t supposed to be any surprises.

Bigelow exploits this novelty to probe more deeply into whether the United States’ escalatory........

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