Kathryn Bigelow and Noah Oppenheim defend A House of Dynamite from the Pentagon’s criticisms
With Netflix’s newest film, A House of Dynamite, Kathryn Bigelow wanted to incite the hard conversation on one of the most difficult realities. And while the Pentagon is responding to her and Noah Oppenheim’s movie with criticisms, they’re happy that it’s being talked about internally. Per The Hollywood Reporter, A House of Dynamite was put together by the filmmakers after doing extensive research with experts who have past experience in this area of the government, and their depiction of the current U.S. system as being able to stop a nuclear missile roughly 50 percent of the time. Pentagon responded with a memo in Bloomberg, stating that their systems “have displayed a 100% accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade.”
In a new interview both Bigelow and Oppenheim had with THR, Bigelow is asked what her reaction to the memo is, and she responds,
It’s interesting. In a perfect world, culture has the potential to drive policy — and if there’s dialogue around the proliferation of nuclear weapons, that is music to my ears, certainly.”
When Oppenheim was asked about his feelings were about the Pentagon deciding to respond to the movie this way, he stated, “There’s no way for us to get in the minds of the folks who wrote that memo, but as Kathryn said, both of us are thrilled to see a conversation happening between policymakers and experts about how to make the world a safer place. So if the film was a catalyst in some way for that larger conversation and dialogue, that’s one of the reasons why we made it — to trigger that kind of conversation.”
Oppenheim was then asked how he feels about the Pentagon opposing their depiction and potentially ruining the credibility of the film. He answers, “As we see it, it’s not a debate between us as filmmakers and the Pentagon. It’s between the Pentagon and the wider community of experts in the space. Senator Edward Markey or retired general Douglas Lute; journalists like Tom Nichols and Fred Kaplan who’ve covered this issue for decades; the APS, which is a nonpartisan organization of physicists — these are the folks who are coming out and saying what we depict in the film, which is that our current missile defense system is highly imperfect, is accurate. On the other side of that conversation, you have the Pentagon apparently asserting that it’s 100 percent effective. We believe all those experts who’ve told us that the system is more like a coin toss like we depict in the film, but we’re glad all these folks are having the debate and the conversation.”
Our Chris Bumbray touched on the polarizing nature of the film (which topped the Netflix charts this week), but as a review for a movie, he said, “Whatever the reaction, no one can deny this is a propulsive thriller that leaves its audience with a terrifying truth to reckon with: the scenario depicted here is all too real, and perhaps likelier than ever. It picks up where Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer left off, with its chilling reminder that the invention of the atomic bomb may have triggered a chain reaction leading to humanity’s end. For that notion alone, A House of Dynamite is the most terrifying film of the year.”
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