Kathryn Bigelow's new thriller is a race to prevent an all-out war.
On Wednesday, Sept. 3, Netflix released the first trailer for Bigelow's new movie A House of Dynamite following its buzzy Venice International Film Festival premiere on Sept. 2. "When a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States," reads an official synopsis for the film, "a race begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond." The new trailer features footage of various characters in the movie while a voiceover dictates excerpts from Carl Sagan's book Pale Blue Dot.
The new movie, which features an ensemble cast led by Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson, also costars Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee, Jason Clarke and more. A House of Dynamite is written by Noah Oppenheim, former president of NBC News.
"I grew up in an era when hiding under your school desk was considered the go-to protocol for surviving an atomic bomb," Bigelow, 73, said in a statement for the Venice International Film Festival. "It seems absurd now -- and it was -- but at the time, the threat felt so immediate that such measures were taken seriously."
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She continued, "Today, the danger has only escalated. Multiple nations possess enough nuclear weapons to end civilisation within minutes. And yet, there's a kind of collective numbness -- a quiet normalisation of the unthinkable. How can we call this 'defense' when the inevitable outcome is total destruction? I wanted to make a film that confronts this paradox -- to explore the madness of a world that lives under the constant shadow of annihilation, yet rarely speaks of it."
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