'A House of Dynamite' Is Almost Too Real

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Transcript

00:00Late in the new Netflix movie, A House of Dynamite, the American president has minutes to decide

00:06whether or not to nuke the whole world, and concludes that

00:10This is insanity, okay?

00:12Very professionally, his commander replies

00:15No, sir. This is reality.

00:18Director Catherine Bigelow has scored a controversial but stirring and perceptive hit.

00:24It's full of interesting details.

00:26But as in her other work, Bigelow is primarily interested in something else.

00:31The psychological limits of individual human beings when they make life or death decisions

00:37for themselves, their loved ones, and all of humanity.

00:42The insanity is this.

00:43The nine countries with nuclear weapons have set up a situation in which one slip, one error,

00:49one miscalculation can cause a chain reaction

00:53in which world leaders acting rationally end up blowing and irradiating the whole world.

01:01And like me, you're wondering what the ones acting irrationally might do.

01:06The movie ends in deliberate ambiguity, because that's what Bigelow wanted.

01:11And because ambiguity is the state we're in,

01:14this movie should be required viewing in Washington, Beijing, Moscow, and everywhere else.

01:22We must restart arms limitation and disarmament talks

01:27before we have, as in the movie, only 19 minutes left to decide whether to destroy ourselves.