Pentagon Disputes ‘House Of Dynamite’ Missile Accuracy; Writer Responds

The U.S. Department of Defense and Netflix are in a clash over how accurate the streamer’s nuclear disaster drama A House of Dynamite truly is.

Highlighting a specific major plot point in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed movie, an October 16 memo from Pentagon officials was produced with the intent to address “false assumptions” from the film, which just dropped on the streaming site.

The document says the failure of the military to stop a missile headed for the continental U.S. depicted in the movie is okay as “a compelling part of the drama intended for the entertainment of the audience,” but the real-world capacities “tell a vastly different story.”

In House of Dynamite, interceptor missiles are said to have a 61% success rate in taking down incoming warheads, like the enemy missile heading to wipe out the almost 10 million residents of greater Chicago as generals and officials in the Idris Elba-led administration scramble to find a solution or unleash global destruction. The Ground-Based Interceptors (GBIs) they launch from Alaska to take out the threat fail, leaving the most powerful military force in human history suddenly out of options.

As a counterpoint, the DoD’s Missile Defense Agency memo earlier this month says its multibillion-dollar hit-to-kill systems “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,” he added of the interceptors, which the U.S. has developed in the post-Star Wars era and will deploy down the line.

The DoD reaction to A House of Dynamite, which premiered in Venice and opened in a limited theater run October 10 before hitting Netflix on Friday, was first reported by Bloomberg. Deadline has seen the document. It questions how on-the-money HoD is in its depiction of taking out a bullet with a bullet, to paraphrase the language in the film that co-stars Rebecca Ferguson, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Jason Clarke and Gabriel Basso.

On the flip side, the project’s screenwriter Noah Oppenheim told MSNBC on Sunday that he would “respectfully disagree” with the Pentagon’s assessment.

Diplomatically, Oppenhiem, the former NBC News chief, also said: “I welcome the conversation. I’m so glad the Pentagon watched, or is watching, and is paying attention to it, because this is exactly the conversation we want to have.”

Bigelow has made it clear she kept the Pentagon at arm’s length to maintain independence. Both the Oscar-winning director and Oppenheim have said HoD “had multiple tech advisers who have worked in the Pentagon.”

For what it’s worth, none of those advisors were from the current administration, Oppenheim admitted on MSNBC.

Not spotlighted by the Pentagon’s memo is another narrative element of HoD in which, once the initial attempt to take down the enemy missile fails, brass partially decide not to try again in order to save the remainder of its Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system for possible further attacks. At that junction in the film, Defense Secretary Reid Baker (played by Harris) rages: “So, it’s a f*cking coin toss? That’s what $50 billion buys us?”

In real life, the U.S. currently has about 44 interceptors available to launch from Fort Greely in Alaska and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. An updated and expanded system is planned to come online in about 2028, with a first round of nearly a half-dozen Next Generation Interceptors and around 40 more over time.

A fact no one argues over: There are about 12,300 nuclear weapons among the arsenals of the U.S. and eight other nations, a terrifying number that could destroy all life on Earth many times over.

“I feel like nuclear weapons, the prospect of their use, has become normalized,” Bigelow told Awardsline’s Antonia Blyth recently. “We don’t think about it, we don’t talk about it. And it’s an unthinkable situation. So, my hope was to maybe move it to the forefront of our lives.”

Neither the Pentagon nor Netflix responded to Deadline’s request for comment on their assessment and the film.