Category: Movies
‘A House of Dynamite’: Netflix turns nuclear war into an HR meeting
Netflix’s thriller “A House of Dynamite” very much wants to teach us something about the folly of waging war with civilization-ending weapons. The lesson it ends up imparting, however, has more to do with the state of contemporary storytelling.
The film revolves around a high-stakes crisis: an unexpected nuclear missile launched from an unspecified enemy and aimed directly at Big City USA. We get to see America’s defense apparatus deal with impending apocalypse in real time.
It seems the best Ms. Bigelow, Mr. Oppenheim, and the team at Netflix can offer up is a lukewarm ‘nukes are bad, mmkay?’
Triple threat
“Revolves” is the operative word here. The movie tells the same story three times from three different vantage points — each in its own 40-minute segment. From first detection to the final seconds before detonation, we watch a bevy of government elites on one interminable red-alert FaceTime, working out how to respond to the strike.
This is the aptly named screenwriter Noah Oppenheim’s second disaster outing for the streamer; he recently co-created miniseries “Zero Day,” which features Robert De Niro investigating a nationwide cyberattack.
That series unspooled a complicated and convoluted conspiracy in the vein of “24.” “A House of Dynamite” clearly aims for something more grounded, which would seem to make accomplished Kathryn Bigelow perfect for the job.
And for the film’s first half-hour she delivers, embedding the viewer with the military officers, government officials, and regular working stiffs for whom being the last line of America’s defense is just another day at the office … until suddenly it isn’t. The dawning horror of their situation is as gripping as anything in “The Hurt Locker” or “Zero Dark Thirty.”
Then it happens two more times.
On repeat
In Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” Duke Orsino laments a repetitive song growing stale: “Naught enters there of what validity and pitch soe’er, but falls into abatement and low price.”
Or put another way, the tune, not realizing its simple beauty, sings itself straight into worthlessness.
And somehow, this manages to be only part of what makes “A House of Dynamite” so unappealing. Our main characters — including head of the White House Situation Room (Rebecca Ferguson), general in charge of the United States Northern Command (Tracy Letts), and the secretary of defense (Jared Harris) — offer no semblance of perspicacity, stopping frequently to take others’ feelings into account before making decisions, all while an ICBM races toward Chicago. From liftoff to impact in 16 minutes or less, or your order free.
Missile defensive
So thorough is this picture of incompetence that the Pentagon felt compelled to issue an internal memo preparing Missile Defense Agency staff to “address false assumptions” about defense capability.
One can hardly blame officials when, in the twilight of the film, we’re shown yet another big-screen Obama facsimile (played by British actor Idris Elba) putting his cadre of sweating advisers on hold to ring Michelle, looking for advice on whether his course of action should be to nuke the whole planet or do nothing. The connection drops — she is in Africa, after all, and her safari-chic philanthropy outfit doesn’t make the satellite signal any stronger. He puts the phone down and continues to look over his black book of options ranging “from rare to well done,” as his nuclear briefcase handler puts it.
And then the movie ends. The repetitive storylines have no resolution, and their participants face no consequences. The single ground missile the U.S. arsenal managed to muster up — between montages of sergeants falling to their knees at the thought of having to do their job — has missed its target.
Designated survivors — with the exception of one high-ranking official who finds suicide preferable — rush to their bunkers. The screen fades to black, over a melancholy overture. Is it any wonder that audiences felt cheated? After sitting through nearly two hours of dithering bureaucrats wasting time, their own time had been wasted by a director who clearly thinks endings are passé.
No ending for you
If you find yourself among the unsatisfied, Bigelow has some words for you. In an interview with Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, she justified her film’s lack of a payoff thusly:
I felt like the fact that the bomb didn’t go off was an opportunity to start a conversation. With an explosion at the end, it would have been kind of all wrapped up neat, and you could point your finger [and say] “it’s bad that happened.” But it would sort of absolve us, the human race, of responsibility. And in fact, no, we are responsible for having created these weapons and — in a perfect world — getting rid of them.
Holy Kamala word salad.
RELATED: Phones and drones expose the cracks in America’s defenses
Photo by dikushin via Getty Images
Bigelow-er
For much of her career, director Kathryn Bigelow has told real stories in interesting ways that — while not always being the full truth and nothing but the truth — were entertaining, well shot, and depicted Americans fulfilling their manifest destiny of being awesome.
That changed with Bigelow’s last film, 2017’s “Detroit,” a progressive, self-flagellating depiction of the 1967 Detroit race riots (final tally: 43 deaths, 1,189 injured) through the eyes of some mostly peaceful black teens and the devil-spawn deputy cop who torments them. “A House of Dynamite” continues this project of national critique.
But what, exactly, is the point? It seems the best Ms. Bigelow, Mr. Oppenheim, and the team at Netflix can offer up is a lukewarm “nukes are bad, mmkay?” This is a lecture on warfare with the subtlety of a John Lennon song, set in a world where the fragile men in charge must seek out the strong embrace of their nearest girlboss.
It’s no secret that 2025 carries a distinct “end times” energy — a year thick with existential threats. AI run amok, political fracture edging toward civil conflict, nuclear brinkmanship, even the occasional UFO headline — pick your poison. And it’s equally obvious that the internet, not the cinema, has become the primary arena where Americans now go to see those anxieties mirrored back at them.
“A House of Dynamite” is unlikely to reverse this trend. If this is the best Hollywood’s elite can come up with after gazing into the void, it’s time to move the movie industry to DEFCON 1.
‘The Naked Gun’ creator David Zucker bashes ‘frightened’ Hollywood elites
Legendary “Airplane!” director David Zucker has a theory about why today’s movies are flopping so badly — and the folks in charge aren’t going to like it.
“The studios are very frightened people afraid to take risks,” the director told Align, stroking his chin. “I wrote an article … about the 9% rule. There’s 9% of people who just don’t have a sense of humor. There’s like zero sense of humor. So the studios are being guided by those people.”
‘There’s 9% of people who just don’t have a sense of humor.’
According to Zucker — whose cinematic pedigree includes comedies like “The Naked Gun,” “BASEketball,” and “Top Secret!” — cancel culture is still alive and well in the film biz, pushed by overly cautious studio brass.
Cracked rearview
“It’s like driving looking through the rearview mirror,” Zucker said — an attitude that leads to unfunny films that repackage old ideas with jokes that don’t land.
Zucker didn’t have to look far to find an example: the recent “The Naked Gun” reboot, which went ahead without his involvement.
RELATED: ‘Trey didn’t have a car’: ‘Airplane!’ director David Zucker on humble origins of ‘South Park’ empire
Blocked calls
Zucker recalled the confusion he felt when he learned Paramount had no intention of consulting him on “The Naked Gun” reboot, despite having pages upon pages of jokes already written. Instead, the studio went with “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane, who came in and took over.
Zucker attempted to explained the debacle:
“I’m excluded from it. I called him. He didn’t return my calls, refused to meet with me. So I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on, but that’s Hollywood.”
Still he said MacFarlane did contact him after the movie finished production and spent “10 minutes just telling me how much he idolized [my movies], hard to get mad at a guy who keeps telling you what a genius you are.”
‘Painful’ viewing
Despite all the flattery, Zucker said he had no intentions of ever seeing the new version of “The Naked Gun,” recalling his experience watching “Airplane II: The Sequel,” with which he also had no involvement.
“If your daughter became a prostitute, would you go watch her work?” he asked. “So you know, it’s painful. It would be painful to sit through. It’s somebody else doing our movie, and they don’t know what they’re doing.”
RELATED: ‘The Naked Gun’ remake is laugh-out-loud funny? Surely, you can’t be serious
(L-R) Seth MacFarlane, Pamela Anderson, and Liam Neeson attend ‘The Naked Gun’ New York Premiere on July 28, 2025. Photo by Arturo Holmes/WireImage
In Zucker’s view, Hollywood’s risk-averse approach is especially obvious in comedies. “If you do a comedy that’s not funny, you can’t hide,” he noted, adding that the new “The Naked Gun” “must have been excruciating to sit through.”
It’s safe to say Zucker won’t be lining up for the upcoming “Spaceballs” reboot either. Not that he was a huge fan of the 1987 original, which he dismissed as “an attempt to copy ‘Airplane!'”
“You can’t do stuff that’s 10, 20 years old … puns [that] were fresh in 1982,” he laughed.
As for his own movies, Zucker said he hopes to advance the pun-filled, slapstick comedy genre he helped popularize — with his next project offering a fresh, humorous spin on film noir.
’Trey didn’t have a car’: ‘Airplane!’ director David Zucker on humble origins of ‘South Park’ empire
The creators of “South Park” didn’t always know it would become a hit — let alone one of the longest-running shows in the history of television.
Just ask Hollywood veteran David Zucker, who hired Trey Parker and Matt Stone shortly before the duo — and the foul-mouthed kids they created — became household names.
‘They were also unsure of if “South Park” would ever work.’
Zucker — who directed seminal spoof comedy “Airplane!” along with his brother Jerry and the late Jim Abrahams — recalled that when he first met the University of Colorado grads in the mid-1990s, they were still very much struggling filmmakers.
Ride share
“They came to my office and I met with these guys, and Trey didn’t have a car,” Zucker said.
Despite their precarious finances, the duo already had a feature film under their belt — 1993’s “Cannibal! The Musical” — as well as animated short “The Spirit of Christmas,” which would soon land them a deal for “South Park.”
Impressed with their talents, Zucker hired Parker and Stone to do a video for Universal executives commemorating the studio’s recent purchase by Canadian beverage giant Seagram.
The duo turned in “Your Studio and You,” a side-splitting send-up of 1950s industrial videos crammed with cameos by the likes of Steven Spielberg, Sylvester Stallone, and Michael J. Fox.
Hedging their bets
Zucker remembered the young newcomers in 1997 when casting the leads for his longtime passion project, “BASEketball.” By then Parker and Stone had made a second film, “Orgazmo,” a comedy about a Mormon missionary (Parker) turned porn star turned superhero. With a $25 million budget and major studio backing, Zucker’s project represented a major step up.
And while the two were then deep in production on the show that would launch their careers, they assumed it would die a quick death once it aired. So they agreed to star in “BASEketball.”
“They were also unsure of if ‘South Park’ would ever work,” said Zucker. “This was a hedge against, you know, Trey having to get his car fixed.”
Upon premiering in August 1997, “South Park” was an instant hit, requiring Parker and Stone to shoot “BASEketball” while simultaneously maintaining their grueling TV schedule.
RELATED: ‘Naked Gun’ creator David Zucker offers ‘Crash’ course in comedy
Rookie year
While Zucker had already written a script for “BASEketball” — inspired by an actual sport he and some friends “invented on my driveway” during the 1980s — he relied on his Gen X collaborators to punch it up for the younger “South Park” fan base.
“They probably wrote about a third of it, and you know, a lot of that stuff, because I didn’t know what kind of language went on between … 20-somethings,” Zucker explained. Both the actors were in their late 20s at the time.
One of Parker and Stone’s most significant additions to the script was helping with the “psych-outs” — tasteless insults “baseketball” players hurl at an opponent in hopes of making him miss a shot.
All-star lineup
Such tactics were never used by the real-life players, whom Zucker described as “all these guys who later became, you know, heads of studios and heads of agencies” — a roster including director Peter Farrelly (“There’s Something About Mary” and “Dumb and Dumber”), former CAA head David “Doc” O’Connor, and former Fox Television Group chair Gary Newman.
RELATED: ‘South Park’ roasted Trump — and the White House is not happy
1998: “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone star in the movie “BASEketball.” Getty Images
Zucker noted that he is emphasizing the “psych-out” element in a new “BASEketball” pitch: a reality show featuring teams of comedians playing the sport while tearing each other down.
As for his old “BASEketball” buddies, Zucker said he recently visited their office to get a 10-minute preview of their new movie, “Whitney Springs,” a live-action comedy musical starring rapper Kendrick Lamar as a black man working as a slave re-enactor at a living history museum who discovers his white girlfriend’s ancestors “owned” his ancestors.
“They showed me 10 minutes of it, and it looks great,” said Zucker.
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‘Last Days’ brings empathy to doomed Sentinel Island missionary’s story
It would be easy to demonize John Allen Chau, the Christian missionary who died while trying to bring the Bible to a remote tribe. The 26-year-old could have introduced new diseases to the North Sentinel Island community, causing serious harm. He also vowed to invade a community that craves isolation above all.
Now imagine a Hollywood film capturing Chau’s short, dramatic life. The industry isn’t known for sympathetic close-ups on faith, to be generous.
‘Whenever we go into places where we’re not comfortable, the first thing is, “I have to impose my point of view. Here’s my worldview.”‘
Yet veteran director Justin Lin (“Star Trek Beyond,” the “Fast & Furious” franchise) took a less expected path in bringing the young man’s life to theaters.
Justin Lin. Photo: Giles Keyte
Quick to judge
“Last Days” stars Sky Yang as John, a determined Christian who vowed to do something remarkable with his life. He risked everything to travel to the North Sentinel Island, hoping to share Jesus Christ’s message.
The story ended tragically, but Lin’s film portrays Chau as a kind-hearted lad whose complicated life led him to his fate. Lin isn’t a Christian, but he treated the material with care and empathy. That wasn’t his first reaction.
“It’s very easy to judge and dismiss. That’s what I did when the story broke,” Lin told Align of the initial news reports, the kind of “hot take” that swiftly decried Chau’s fateful decision. “It didn’t sit well with me that I was so quick to judge and dismiss him.”
A father’s story
An Outside Magazine feature on Chau’s life had a powerful effect on the filmmaker. The story shared Chau’s father’s perspective on his late son, among other details.
That rocked Lin.
“I have a teenage son. As a parent, I know exactly what he was going through, how you’re trying to impart your wisdom, make sure they’re not going through any hardships,” he said. “What I learned from that article was that if you do it on your timeline, and your son is not ready, you just miss each other.”
The project didn’t involve fast cars or intergalactic travel, but the change of pace spoke to the veteran filmmaker.
“I really wanted to try something different,” added Lin, even if he wouldn’t have the kind of blockbuster budget at his back.
“It’s going to be a run-and-gun, small crew,” he imagined before reading more from the real Chau’s diary. “In John’s writing, he was clearly inspired by adventure novels and Hollywood films. … I’m going to honor that and be the signpost for our film. … It’s an intimate story, but it has to feel like a big Hollywood film.”
He called in some professional favors to give the film a Tinsel Town sheen that otherwise might not have been feasible.
RELATED: Pistol-packing rabbi targets anti-Semitism in action flick ‘Guns & Moses’
Still courtesy Pictures from the Fringe
Fresh perspectives
Lin approached Chau’s faith delicately, while acknowledging the dubious decisions he made along the way. A mid-film romance ends unexpectedly, for example, allowing for fresh perspectives on Chau’s quest.
That balance came via an extensive effort on the director’s part.
“Whenever we go into places where we’re not comfortable, the first thing is, ‘I have to impose my point of view. Here’s my worldview.’ I made that commitment early on to say, ‘No,’” he said. “Taking three years of my life [for this film] … was to connect with his humanity.”
More with less
“Last Days” looks as lush as a $100+ million film, the kind that Lin routinely delivers. He didn’t have those resources nor an A-list cast to bring John Chau’s life to the big screen. Yang is a minor revelation, while Ken Leung’s turn as the young man’s father is heartbreaking.
Lin has a knack for doing more with less.
“I made a credit card movie for $250,000, and that movie opened the door and gave me all these opportunities,” said Lin of “Better Luck Tomorrow,” his 2002 breakthrough made by maxing out his personal credit limit. The film earned $3.8 million theatrically, a tidy sum given the budget. Hollywood swiftly came calling.
“Last Days” may have an indie sensibility, but Lin still felt the pressure to “nudge” the film in certain directions. The real Chau refused to be “boxed in” by society, yet the film industry tried to do just that with the film.
“Can you make this a Christian movie?” he recalled of the behind-the-scenes chatter about “Last Days.” … I didn’t understand or even appreciate that kind of nudge. … ‘If you really wanna be marketable, you should do more of this.’ Those conversations for me ended very quickly.”
“That is a challenge with independent films … the temptation. … ‘If I give you all this money, can you cast my son?’ Those are all choices you encounter,” he said.
Lin will find himself on more familiar ground with the upcoming “BRZRKR,” based on the Boom! Studios comic book co-created by Keanu Reeves. The “John Wick” star served as an angel investor in “Last Days.”
“I didn’t grow up wanting to make action movies, but I ended up enjoying the process,” he admitted.
The public got a sneak peek at “Last Days” during the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, months before its Oct. 24 theatrical rollout. The post-screening Q and A left him hopeful he had accomplished what he had set out to do with the film.
“Five minutes in, they could find a common bridge in [the film],” Lin recalled. “We need that now more than ever.”
