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.
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