'THIS FILM IS...A CALL TO ACTION'

OSCAR-WINNING DIRECTOR KATHRYN BIGELOW THINKS PEOPLE have FORGOTTEN WORLD-ENDING NUCLEAR WEAPONS EXIST. SHE'S on a MISSION to REMIND THEM with 'A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE'

- by H. Alan Scott

THE MOST TERRIFYING THING ABOUT NUCLEAR weapons isn't the warheads, but how quiet we as a society have become about them. The Cold War-era fear of total annihilation has morphed into a dangerous cultural amnesia that Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow finds deafening. With her newest film, A House of Dynamite, she is determined to make the world listen again.

“I think the fact that the conversation has drifted off has a lot to do with the fact that nuclear weapons have sort of been normalized,” Bigelow tells Newsweek. “And that in and of itself is a pretty terrifying idea. And the fact that we don't look at it with the kind of global annihilation prospect that we should. I mean, we don't tend to take it very seriously.”

The film itself is a searing political thriller starring Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Tracy Letts, Jared Harris, Jason Clarke and Anthony Ramos as government officials grappling with the real-time reality of an incoming nuclear missile. The film plunges audiences into a terrifying 18 minutes replayed from different vantage points within the American government as several agencies scramble to respond to an unidentified nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile hurtling toward North America.

“We wanted to tell the story in real time,” says screenwriter Noah Oppenheim. “We wanted the audience to experience how short 18 minutes is.”

For Bigelow, the film is hypothetical, designed to “unpack what would happen” in the halls of power during an unthinkable crisis.

The ignorance about the dangers of nuclear warfare can be traced back to a single moment in history, according to Oppenheim. “I think the end of the Cold War was a turning point,” he says. “Once the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a sense of false relief that like, ‘OK, the threat had ended.”