Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, A House of Dynamite, captures the horror and insanity of nuclear war. But by portraying the US atomic arsenal as an inheritance from the past rather than a product of our own time, it lets our political leaders off the hook.

A House of Dynamite is written like an op-ed. Its characters speak in terse paragraphs that tend to close with punchy kickers. And true to the op-ed genre, all the film’s big ideas are communicated through metaphors.

“We’re talking about hitting a bullet with a bullet,” says a deputy national security advisor after describing ground-based missile defenses. “I call them rare, medium, and well-done,” says a Marine officer after passing a binder of nuclear strike options to the president, played by an uncharacteristically flat Idris Elba. Lat

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