Pentagon Critiques A House of Dynamite’s Factual Accuracy

by

Be warned, this contains spoilers for the movie A House of Dynamite! Director Kathryn Bigelow is known for realistic filmmaking, but her new thriller is already facing criticism for how accurately it portrays events. The Netflix film centers on various US government agencies as they discover an incoming intercontinental ballistic missile and scramble to find a way to intercept it and decide how the world should react.

Starring Rebecca Ferguson, Jared Harris, and Idris Elba, the film A House of Dynamite received mostly positive reviews when it was released in October. Both critics and viewers seemed to enjoy it, giving it approval ratings of 79% and 77% on Rotten Tomatoes. As of today, it’s still the most popular movie on Netflix.

It seems The Pentagon isn’t pleased with the Netflix thriller A House of Dynamite. A recently obtained internal memo from Bloomberg shows the agency is worried about the movie’s inaccuracies and was preparing to correct misleading information about the country’s ground missile defense system and provide accurate details.

The film shows that attempts to prevent attacks aren’t always successful, emphasizing the importance of having a system to defend against missiles at home. While the movie’s fictional interceptors fail dramatically – a choice made for storytelling – actual tests of these systems have yielded much better results.

The memo leaves out a key detail from the movie: the expense of the ground-based interceptors. In the film, the Secretary of Defense, Reid Baker, famously wondered if $50 billion had been wasted on something as uncertain as “a fng coin toss.” The document simply states the defense system is expensive, but argues that it’s far cheaper than the consequences of a nuclear attack.

The Pentagon also challenged the film A House of Dynamite’s claim that its missiles are only accurate 61% of the time. They argued the movie is based on older, initial designs, and that current Ground-Based Interceptors (GBIs) have successfully hit their targets in tests for more than ten years. However, Laura Grego, a researcher with the Union of Concerned Scientists, questioned the Pentagon’s data, even acknowledging a minor implausibility in the movie’s storyline.

A strong missile defense system needs to be able to handle many incoming missiles, including fake ones designed to trick the system, and also defend itself from attacks. However, the threat portrayed in this movie was surprisingly simple and not very challenging.

So, I just read that the Pentagon officially put out a statement saying they had absolutely nothing to do with how things were portrayed in Kathryn Bigelow’s new Netflix thriller, House of Dynamite. Apparently, nobody from the movie – not even Bigelow herself – asked for their input or advice. And they want to be very clear: the film doesn’t represent their opinions or what they’re focused on at all.

However, the film’s screenwriter, Noah Oppenheim, countered these claims in an interview with MSNBC. He stated he spoke with numerous missile defense experts, all of whom agreed to be identified. Oppenheim explained he asked these experts, along with former White House and Pentagon officials, many detailed questions about how the defense system functions and how it would respond to a missile attack. He believes the film accurately depicts these processes and procedures. You can find the full interview below.

Our missile defense system isn’t foolproof, and it has weaknesses. We’re open to discussing improvements with the Pentagon and finding ways to enhance our safety, and the portrayal of this in our film is based on facts. We welcome a productive conversation about making the system better.

Kathryn Bigelow, a two-time Oscar winner, frequently bases her films on true events or realistic settings. This has led to scrutiny of her work’s accuracy in the past. While veterans generally enjoyed The Hurt Locker as an action film, they strongly criticized its inaccurate portrayal of teamwork and life during wartime. Similarly, Zero Dark Thirty faced criticism for its depiction of torture and for minimizing the Obama administration’s involvement in the mission to kill Osama bin Laden.

This isn’t the first time a Netflix show has faced criticism from the US government recently. Earlier this month, the series Boots was also targeted for alleged inaccuracies. The Pentagon specifically called it “woke garbage” because it portrayed gay Marines and accurately depicted the historical illegality of openly gay individuals serving in the military, both in the show’s 1990s timeframe and in the original memoir’s 1970s setting.

The positive reaction from the Pentagon helped the show Nobody Wants This gain even more viewers before its comeback, suggesting that A House of Dynamite will likely remain popular. Beyond that, the film’s detailed look at the US missile defense system could lead to discussions from both sides of the political spectrum and even a response from the filmmaker, Kathryn Bigelow, defending its accuracy.

Read More

2025-10-28 18:12