During the Cold War there was no shortage of movies and TV dramas dealing with the prospect of a nuclear apocalypse.
From Stanley Kramer's 'On the Beach' in 1959 with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardiner and Fred Astaire to Sidney Lumet's 1964 thriller 'Fail Safe' with Henry Fonda, Walter Matthau and Dan O'Herlihy to Nicholas Meyer's 1983 miniseries 'The Day After' with Jason Robards, JoBeth Williams and Steve Guttenburg, filmmakers and screenwriters explored the horror of nuclear warfare from the perspective of military personnel or ordinary citizens.
'Threads' in 1984 with Reece Dinsdale and Karen Meagher on BBC2 was a particularly graphic and sobering account of how a regional English city like Sheffield would fare.
Others took a slightly different approach, with the director Stanley Kubrick deploying satire in 1964 to still drive home the horror in 'Doctor Strangelove (Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb)' with Peyer Sellers, George C Scott and Sterling Hayden.
John Cleese, Barry Morse, Richard Griffiths and Alexei Sayle appeared in a six part sitcom in 1982 on ITV 'Whoops Apocalypse' written by David Renwick and Andrew Marshall, with Peter Cook and Rik Mayall featuring in a movie version four years later.
John Badham's superb 1983 movie 'War Games' with Matthew Broderick, Ally Sheedy and Dabney Coleman explored how a teenage computer hacker could inadvertently spark a nuclear war.
In 1986, Jimmy Murakami's 'When The Wind Blows' used animation to tell the heartbreaking story of a stoical elderly English couple, voiced by Peggy Ashcroft and John Mills, faithfully trying to follow Government advice and get on with their lives in the wake of an attack.
In the post Cold War era, however, there has been a lot less nuclear dramas about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, even though more countries have become nuclear powers.
The ranks of the US, Russia, the UK and France, China and Israel were swelled by India, Pakistan and North Korea as well from the mid 1970s to 2006.
With Iran also looking to develop a nuclear arms capacity, you'd think the eagerness of regimes to join the ranks of nuclear powers might have spurred some dramatists or satirists into action.
But with the exception of Christopher Nolan's Academy Award garlanded 'Oppenheimer' which focused on the development of the bomb during World War Two, it's taken Oscar winning director Kathryn Bigelow to fire a shot across the bows and spark a discussion about the wisdom of having missiles in a world with populist leaders who like to play the strongman.
'A House of Dynamite' is a 'Vantage Point' style thriller that wonders what would happen if a rogue state like North Korea were to fire a nuclear missile at a city like Chicago.
Examining the same series of events from the perspectives of officials, military personnel and politicians in the White House, the Pentagon, Fort Greely in Alaska, Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska and also the US President as he is ushered out of a public event, it's a wake up call for people to start discussing again the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe.
Rebecca Ferguson plays Captain Olivia Walker who embarks on a shift in the White House Situation Room after looking after a sick child, only to be told not long into it that the North Korean missile has been launched towards the US and has only been detected flying over the Pacific.
As more information is assembled, there's an increasing sense of panic amd doom when an attempt to shoot it down fails and it becomes clear it's hurtling towards Chicago.
Over the course of the film, we see Jason Clarke's Washington DC based Admiral Mark Miller, Gabriel Basso's Deputy National Security Adviser Jake Baerington, Jared Harris' Secretary of Defence Reid Baker, Tracy Letts' Nebraska based US Strategic Command General Anthony Brady, Moses Ingram's Federal Emergency Management Agency official Cathy Rogers, Cathy Lee's National Security Agency adviser Ana Park and Idris Elba's unnamed US President grappling with scraps of information they receive and the full enormity of an imminent nuclear strike.
There's panic and disbelief as the various characters weigh up known facts, wild speculation and inevitable feelings of concern for loved ones in Chicago, Kenya and elsewhere and take decisions that could ultimately lead to nuclear Armageddon.
Working from a screenplay by the former NBC News producer Noah Oppenheimer, Bigelow adopts a realist cinema approach with Barry Ackroyd's camera nervously darting around the rooms where decision makers gather or locations where they are on foot.
Film editor Kirk Baxter also frenetically cuts between the talking heads in different locations.
The result is a movie that really ought to be viewed in cinemas to be truly appreciated.
Naturally it loses some of its power when viewed on Netflix on a smart pad, smartphone or a TV (unless you have a decent sound system in your home).
'The Hurt Locker' and 'Zero Dark Thirty' director's movie requires complete focus which, with all the best will in the world, is pretty hard to achieve with all the distractions of your home.
The cast, though, are superb with Ferguson, Elba, Basso, Clarke, Letts and Harris particularly strong.
And while the first account of the events leading to the nuclear strike is inevitably the most stirring of the three and the final version sags a little, Bigelow is a skilful enough to ensure her film doesn't become too boring or lose its visual spark.
Pentagon chiefs have been upset about the film's depiction of the US defence system failing to take out the North Korean missile.
However the fact her film has triggered this debate is a victory for Bigelow
As she told Deadline, the point of the movie is that we have stopped thinking about nuclear weapons and talking about them. They have become normalised.
Maybe in a less stable world, it's time we started thinking and talking about them again.
('A House of Dynamite' was released in UK and Irish cinemas on October 3, 2025 before being made available for streaming on Netflix on October 24, 2025)
It's inspired eight movies, several radio plays, various TV series, a video game, comics and a Jeff Wayne concept album featuring Richard Burton.
It notoriously inspired an Orson Welles' groundbreaking radio production in 1938 that convinced a lot of Americans that a Martian invasion was really happening.
Now HG Wells' 'The War of the Worlds' has inspired a Universal Pictures movie on Amazon Prime directed by Rich Lee that sets out to tell the classic sci-fi story for the digital age.
Ice Cube plays Will Radford, a US Department of Homeland Security threat assessor who spends his day on his desktop assessing potential terrorist threats.
Will hops from surveillance camera to surveillance camera on the lookout for terror suspects and hackers, advising SWAT teams carrying out raids and occasionally checking on his grown up kids.
He also sometimes receives messages from a good friend in NASA, Eva Longoria's Dr Sandra Salas who starts to notice weird weather patterns.
Answering to Clark Gregg's Director of Homeland Security Donald Briggs, Will is guiding Andrea Savage's FBI agent Sheila Jeffries during a raid on a suspected hacker's hideout when meteors start to rain down on Washington DC and other cities around the globe.
As 24 hours news channels around the world go into a frenzy, Will frantically flits between calls with his bosses, Sandra, Sheila, his gamer son Henry Hunter Hall's Dave Radford, his pregnant biomedical scientist daughter Iman Benson's Faith and her Amazon delivery driver boyfriend Devon Bostock's Mark Goodman.
These become increasingly intense as machines emerge from the meteors and unleash a world invasion.
Will soon finds himself jumping between personal calls and briefings involving Briggs, Michael O'Neill's Defense Secretary Walter Crystal and Jim Meskimen's US President but can he also keep his family and friends safe while performing his duties?
And will one of the characters figure out how to defeat the Martian invasion?
Lee and his screenwriters Kenneth A Golde and Marc Hyman set out to tell Wells' story for 21st Century audiences used to hopping between social media and streaming platforms.
But is it fair to compare this approach to Orson Welles' adaptation?
Probably not, as any 21st Century adaptation would definitely not have the same kind of impact as the 1938 broadcast because of the proliferation of traditional and social media channels and the increased segmentation of audiences.
The other yardstick to measure Lee's film, though, would be Steven Spielberg's superb post 9/11 2005 movie adaptation with Tom Cruise.
Sadly against that measure, it falls considerably short.
While Spielberg and his screenwriters Josh Friedman and David Koepp followed a traditional movie narrative and executed it really well, Lee, Golde and Hyman's adaptation hops about frenetically like a frog on crack cocaine.
It's brash, it's noisy and it's really irritating.
It's also terribly far fetched - a storyline about Will and his colleagues trying to track down a hacker known as the Disruptor takes a particularly silly twist.
It's also tiresome.
It doesn't take very long for the novelty of Ice Cube's Will talking to a variety of people on his desktop to wear off.
And when compared to 'A House of Dynamite,' the film shows the difference a good filmmaker can make to material like this.
While Bigelow pulls a lot of visual tricks from her bag to elevate a script full of talking heads, Lee's direction is flat and uninspired.
What he fails to understand is if I really wanted to watch people watching live streams and doing Zooms, I'd sit on my own sofa and look at family members instead of bothering to watch people doing it on TV.
Lee's version of 'War of the Worlds' may be aimed at the YouTube generation.
But if this kind of storytelling is the future of cinema, we're in for a lot of very dull and disappointing movies in the years ahead.
('War of the Worlds' was made available for streaming on Amazon Prime on July 30, 2025)
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