The end of the world

Recently, a movie debuted on Netflix called A House of Dynamite and it's about a nuclear strike on a U.S. city and depicts the moments leading up to the strike.

It's a good flick, with drama and tension and all of that. The U.S. in the movie does try to stop the missile from hitting Chicago, but missile defense is a real hit or miss, despite recent clarification from the Pentagon.

I follow the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists -- the people who set the Doomsday Clock -- on Bluesky, and one of its authors spent the last couple of weeks watching 20 different nuclear films.

I did something like this late last year, going through the movies I haven't seen. Some of them really stuck with me, and I want to give them a quick mention here, since A House of Dynamite has me thinking about them again.

Oppenheimer - It's my favorite Christopher Nolan movie, and there are bits that I do find myself thinking about randomly. I like the part just before the test when Oppie says he can't guarantee that a chain reaction that's unstoppable won't start and destroy the earth. That's fun.

Threads - Americans will talk about The Day After being the definitive holocaust movie -- even so much so it influenced a U.S. president to seek disarmament -- but the real terror is in Threads. It's a genuinely fucked up British movie. It covers the moments immediately leading up to and following a nuclear strike, and goes from there. It's horrifying and you shouldn't show it to children. There's no silver lining or happy ending.

Fail Safe (the original) - This movie is a must-see in the genre, and is terrifying. In order to prevent a nuclear holocaust the president must sacrifice New York City. The premise (a mistake nuclear strike) creates the tension around the end of humanity. It's like The Sum of All Fears, without the Affleck. It's also scarier because it feels so believable.

Many other nuclear-based movies, like The Hunt for Red October, Crimson Tide, the Bond flicks, just don't feel like nuclear disaster movies. Or at least they don't stick with me as them. Disaster movies like Armageddon, which the author of the article watched, don't even have the yield to register on this scale for me.

Sure, Crimson Tide is close, but I still view it as a submarine movie even if the plot centers around the orders to launch nukes. Plus, I don't think it's a particularly great movie.

By Dawn's Early Light - A movie in some ways very similar to Fail Safe, but addresses what happens if someone doesn't follow the President's orders. A distinct part of the movie is when, to prevent the final nuclear launch, some of our main characters fly their jet into the command plane and the person ordering the strike to prevent the launch. It's a bit cryptic here, but a movie you have to watch to understand the intricacies of an escalating nuclear situation and hawkish advisors pushing the retaliatory narrative.

Finally, there's Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It's a Kubrick classic, and the idea of a Doomsday Device is something talked about a ton in science fiction, and even has some roots in reality.

It's a great flick -- a dark comedy -- and is immensely quotable. I think it can be terrifying for people to watch, but I think what worries me the most is how some of those very things the movie warned us about -- like Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper -- are actually reality today. Some of the things RFK, Jr. have said publicly that he wants to implement policies that are literally plot points in this movie.

I enjoyed A House of Dynamite, and if you want to watch some other content in that genre, you can't go wrong with the ones I recommend here. Threads, though, is the most gruesome.

Now, maybe I should talk about submarine movies at some point? I have thoughts.

(Note: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. If you buy something from one of those links, I might make a few cents. But that's not why I shared them.)