‘A House of Dynamite’ Slammed by Pentagon as “Fictional”

The Pentagon is apparently not a fan of Netflix. After throwing shade at the streamer’s “Boots,” the U.S. Department of Defense is now criticizing Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite,” which dropped on Netflix last Friday.

According to Bloomberg, the DoD’s Missile Defense Agency sent out an internal memo on October 16th, claiming ‘House of Dynamite’ gets the facts about missile defense all wrong: “The fictional interceptors in the movie miss their target and we understand this is intended to be a compelling part of the drama intended for the entertainment of the audience,” but results from real-world testing “tell a vastly different story.”

In the movie, a missile heading for Chicago has just a 50% chance of being intercepted. The Pentagon claims that to be wildly off. The memo insists that America’s multibillion-dollar hit-to-kill systems have “displayed a 100% accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade.”

“The numbers tell us what is occurring and we need to know,” a well-positioned military official told Deadline today of the DoD’s assertion. “The results are very very good, with the program scheduled to grow over the next decade.”

‘Dynamite’ screenwriter Noah Oppenheim, a former NBC News exec, politely disagrees. Speaking to MSNBC, he said, “I welcome the conversation. I’m so glad the Pentagon watched—or is watching—and is paying attention, because this is exactly the conversation we want to have.” Bigelow and Oppenheim also point out that they did consult multiple tech advisers with Pentagon experience, just none from the current administration. Bigelow adds she deliberately kept the Pentagon at arm’s length to maintain creative independence.

The film unfolds Rashomon-style, slicing the story into three perspectives within the U.S. government as an unidentified nation lobs a nuclear missile toward American soil. The truly terrifying thing isn’t just the threat itself—it’s the staggering incompetence on display, which must have irked the Pentagon to no end. Everyone—from the President to national security advisors—is fumbling in the dark, and if that missile is really coming, the odds of shooting it down with a counterstrike are slim to none.

We’re all teetering on the brink of catastrophic oblivion, Bigelow and Oppenheim seem to be saying, and not in a vague, metaphorical way. Our capacity to defend the film’s targeted city, Chicago, or to strike back at whoever might be launching these missiles is, in a word, pathetic.

What’s not up for debate? The world still has about 12,300 nuclear weapons spread across nine countries—enough to destroy life on Earth many times over.