SCOOP: Pentagon and filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow on America's missile defense
Inside A House of Dynamite's D.C. premiere.
The Pentagon is disputing a new movie’s characterization of a weak American missile defense system, after the movie, A House of Dynamite’s Washington, D.C. premiere.
A House of Dynamite revolves around a nuclear missile of unknown provenance hurtling toward America. In the movie, U.S. forces fail to intercept the missile. In an October memo from the Missile Defense Agency, the Trump administration argued that America is far more ready than the film would have viewers believe — a criticism the film’s director responded to by saying she would “just would have to resort to all the technical advisors and experts that we consulted, that Noah [Oppenheim] consulted.”
During the film’s premiere, its director Kathryn Bigelow addressed the movie’s critics and the movie’s controversial ending.
“I’ve been asked this a couple of times,” Bigelow said, when Puck’s Leigh Ann Caldwell asked about the movie’s ending. “But if you look at it from a standpoint of what could be the most obvious ending? A big mushroom cloud? What does that give you?”
“You don’t know who the enemy is” in the entire movie, Bigelow explained. “There’s nobody to point a finger at, which absolves us of any responsibility. The enemy is really us, who have these weapons all around us. We don’t talk about them, we don’t have any kind of meaningful nonproliferation process in process…we’ve all seen footage of Hiroshima, we’ve all seen footage of Nagasaki, that’s kind of a morbid desire.”
“It’s not really a debate between us as filmmakers and the Pentagon,” Oppenheim, the film’s writer, added. “It’s a debate between the Pentagon and the wider community of experts in missile defense. The statistic in the film is accurate” that 61 percent of Ground-Based Interceptors hit their target if they successfully separate from the rocket.
However, Oppenheim added, “the Pentagon is not wrong in that the more recent tests have been more effective than the previous ones, but they’d have to do a lot more successful ones to bring that statistic up. The larger point, though, is what’s the best way to keep ourselves safe? Now, there are some people, well intentioned, who would say we need to build an impenetrable shield and that’s going to keep us safe. There are others, probably including ourselves in that group, that would say that non-proliferation and reducing the number of these weapons and the risk of their use is the best way to keep us safe.”
Bigelow and her team relied on a series of military veterans to ensure that the movie was as accurate as possible — and Oppenheim said that “the fun of making movies is you get to meet the best people.”