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It starts as a normal day, with a mom bidding her sick kid goodbye before heading to work. A few hours later, the president of the United States is helicoptering away from Washington with a laminated binder on his lap that lays out three escalating options for a retaliatory nuclear strike that could destroy the world—in the words of a military aide, “rare, medium, and well done.” Before the president can decide, the screen cuts to black.

That’s the basic plot of Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, a propulsive thriller distributed by Netflix and available to stream since October. The film depicts what might happen if an unnamed adversary launched a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile at Chicago. A Rashomon-style story divided into three chapters, it shows multiple characters’ perspectives on the same 18-minute window between when U.S. radar first detects the missile and the moments before it hits, weaving together an open-ended morality tale about a collective human failure that could spell collective doom.

It’s a message that could have resonated at any point since 1945, the year the U.S. tested and dropped the world’s first atomic bombs. Yet A House of Dynamite could scarcely be timelier. The risk of nuclear proliferation—and, perhaps, war between nuclear-armed nations—has risen sharply in recent years. Fighting between Ukraine and Russia, tensions between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, a rogue North Korean regime, and Donald Trump’s threats to resume U.S. nuclear testing and war with Iran have created a perilously complex atomic landscape. Treaties meant to limit nuclear arsenals—including, as of last month, the only remaining one between the U.S. and Russia—have lapsed. Yet Americans seem to have gotten less worried about nuclear weapons since the Cold War: A Pew poll last year found a public preoccupied by terrorism, climate change, pandemics, and other issues.

In that context, A House of Dynamite should be the movie that everyone is buzzing about this Oscars weekend. Instead, it isn’t even nominated. Variety, which confidently declared Bigelow’s “112-minute anxiety marathon” an awards-season shoe-in last fall, recently named it one of 30 overlooked movies this year. The cause of the snub is unknowable. Maybe Netflix—which received nominations for Train Dreams, KPop Demon Hunters, and Frankenstein—deprioritized the film. Some speculate that its ambiguous ending alienated audiences, although both viewers and critics seem to have liked the movie overall.

Whatever the reason, the effect is clear. Movies, for better or worse, are among the few remaining ways for Americans to encounter, metabolize, and wrestle with big moral issues at scale. Bigelow, a child of the 1950s who remembers practicing duck-and-cover drills at school and the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director, has described A House of Dynamite as, fundamentally, a question: “Do we want to live in a world that’s so combustible?” The Oscars snub is a missed opportunity for more audiences to try to answer it. “The problem has been around so long it’s become normalized,” said Amy J. Nelson, a senior fellow at New America, a D.C.-based think tank, who has studied Americans’ relative complacency about the threat of nuclear weapons. “I think there is a failure of imagination across the board.”

A House of Dynamite tries to break that apathy by inviting us to view its events through almost any political frame of reference. The president, played by a breathy, beleaguered Idris Elba and known only by his call sign, “Icon,” is of indeterminate party and ideology. He seems positioned midway between Barack Obama’s swagger and Trump’s dunderheadedness (there’s a reference to “executive time”), making him a stand-in for virtually anyone who could occupy the Oval Office. To similar effect, cut-and-paste soldiers with generic names like Gonzalez and Brady populate the film as it bounces from an Alaskan Army base to the monitor-encrusted White House Situation Room to antiseptic U.S. military command centers. They’re not cardboard cutouts, exactly, but they’re blank enough slates for us to project onto.

Bigelow’s attention to detail helps. She filmed on site at FEMA and built sets to resemble U.S. Strategic Command and the Situation Room. On-screen text helpfully demystifies acronyms like GBIs (ground-based interceptors, American-made rockets that fail to destroy the incoming missile in one of the film’s tensest moments) and PEOC (the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a bunker beneath the White House where several characters gather as the debate shifts to whether the U.S. should unleash its nuclear arsenal in response). Slate’s Fred Kaplan, who has reported on nuclear weapons for decades, argued that most of the movie’s scenarios—including a conference call involving senior military officials that morphs into a cold-blooded contemplation of nuclear annihilation—pass the smell test. Other experts have quibbled with certain details, questioning the plausibility of a “bolt from the blue” attack or noting that the U.S. would almost certainly launch many more interceptors.

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To Nelson, the New America expert, those critiques evade the point. “Films like this force us to imagine the unthinkable,” she said. Still, the movie seems to sympathize with many Americans’ misplaced faith in the remoteness of nuclear war. “There’s a plan for this?” a young national security aide asks after a superior tells him to notify the Army Corps of Engineers to dig them out if a bomb hits the White House. “This is insanity,” Elba’s president says after a hawkish general played by Tracy Letts makes the case for preemptively nuking America’s foes. “No, sir. This is reality,” the general responds.

In the end, it’s both. The film suggests that the inhuman logic of nuclear deterrence, mapped out decades ago in a Cold War context, is a losing game so long as we all inhabit a house with walls rigged to blow. The film’s White House is staffed with experts who speak Mandarin and recite North Korean missile capabilities on command. But once someone lights the match, competence matters little. Professionalism breaks down. Coolheaded officials cry at their desks. The defense secretary, played by a painfully American-accented Jared Harris, throws himself off a roof. “We did every fucking thing right,” one soldier yells in despair. Exactly, Nelson said. “It really makes people think about, OK, well, if we did everything right and still got that outcome, what should we change about the structure of the system?”

Bigelow’s answer seems to be that the safest world is one without nuclear weapons. Absent burning down the house, Nelson told me that’s probably a pipe dream, at least for now. Trump has turned the U.S. into an unreliable negotiator, ripping up Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran in his first term and repeatedly bombing it in his second. Any meaningful arms-control agreements would have to include China, which has been growing its arsenal.

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But greater awareness does seem possible, notwithstanding the academy’s snub this year. Movies like Dr. Strangelove (1964) and The Day After (1983) influenced policymakers and fueled public opposition to nuclear arms. In today’s fractured attention economy, “there isn’t going to be a single film that’s going to surface this issue in the consciousness of most Americans,” Nelson said, “but what we can hope for is a cumulative effect.” In recent years, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, the journalist Annie Jacobsen’s bestselling Nuclear War: A Scenario, and the video game–turned–TV show Fallout have tackled hypothetical armageddon. If Hollywood reflects the American anxieties of the moment, it seems more people may be catching on.

Saturating audiences with doomsday stories risks desensitizing them, Nelson warned. But interspersed throughout A House of Dynamite are small moments that remind us of the stakes: a close-up on a character’s wedding ring, bustling D.C. streets, children playing. I asked Nelson, who works and has built a life in Washington, if those scenes disturbed her. “I tell my children I’m training them for the apocalypse,” she said. “And the film just really underscored that.”

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