The following post contains some light SPOILERS for A House of Dynamite.
The U.S. Department of Defense says that while the events that unfurl in Netflix’s new doomsday political thriller, A House of Dynamite, are certainly gripping on screen, they’re also inaccurate.
In Kathryn Bigelow’s film, when military radars detect a nuclear missile headed straight for the continental U.S., the president plus various government individuals and departments have less than 20 minutes to try to neutralize the weapon and formulate a retaliatory response. The only problem? (Other than the catastrophic bomb, of course.) No one has any idea who sent the missile, or why.
It’s an edge-of-your-seat premise as the film tightly follows a group of understandably on-edge political actors who must navigate the unthinkable. Some are forced to stay behind to deal with the dilemma while others are evacuated; others still have loved ones directly located in the potential impact zone, raising their personal stakes in the crisis. Everyone has a part to play as the political drama unfolds, but perhaps none more so than the handful of armed forces members tasked with stopping the missile before it’s too late.
Since its release to the streamer on October 24, viewers online have debated and discussed the actions, timelines and protocols seen in the film. Apparently chatter surrounding the movie made its way to Washington, D.C. The Pentagon subsequently released an internal memo disputing certain events that take place in the film so that members have “situational awareness and [are] not ‘surprised’ by the topic, which may come up in conversations or meetings.”
Specifically the Pentagon disputes the moment in which the military is ultimately unable to stop the missile headed toward the U.S. when one of its two interceptor missiles malfunctions and the other fails to neutralize the warhead upon collision.
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According to Variety, officials intended to address “false assumptions” from the film and “provide correct facts and a better understanding” via a memo sent to staff on October 16. The note, obtained by Bloomberg, urges that while the military’s failure to neutralize the nuclear missile in the movie is “a compelling part of the drama intended for the entertainment of the audience,” real-world testing “tell a vastly different story” about the U.S.’s defense capabilities.
In the film, Ground-Based Interceptor missiles (GBIs) have a 61 percent success rate in destroying incoming weapons. (A “f—ing coin toss,” as one character puts it.) However, the Missile Defense Agency memo sent this month counters that its multi-billion-dollar defense systems have “displayed a 100 percent accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade.” Speaking to Deadline, an anonymous “well-positioned military official” also said that “the results [of their systems testing] are very very good, with the program scheduled to grow over the next decade.”
The team behind the film would beg to differ, however. Bigelow said during an interview with CBS Sunday Morning that production did not work directly with the military while filming, but that they had “multiple tech advisers [on set] who have worked in the Pentagon.”
Meanwhile, screenwriter Noah Oppenheim told MSNBC that he would have to “respectfully disagree” with the DoD’s response to A House of Dynamite. “I’m not a missile defense expert, but I did talk to many missile defense experts who were all on the record … So what you see on screen is hopefully a fairly accurate portrait of the reality that exists,” he insisted.
“Unfortunately, our missile defense system is highly imperfect. If the Pentagon wants to have a conversation about improving it or what the next step might be in keeping all of us safer, that’s the conversation we want to have. But what we show in the movie is accurate,” Oppenheim added.
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