November 4, 2025 – This thriller takes us right to the heart-pounding brink of World War III. Who better to direct this than Kathryn Bigelow, the Academy Award-winning director of “The Hurt Locker?” True to form, Bigelow, who also directed “Zero Dark Thirty” cranks up the suspense like the expert she is.

This movie, available on Netflix, has been in the news a lot lately because the officials in the U.S. Department of Defense (which is now nicknamed the Department of War) have claimed that the scenario of a nuclear missile slipping through America's defenses is impossible. The people who made this movie, and did the research for it (it was written by Noah Oppenheim of “Jackie”) say it is accurate.

Given that officials of the U.S. Government have very little competence, or credibility these days, I think this movie accurately portrays the possibility of an ICBM getting through the defenses. As for what President Trump would do if such a thing were to happen, nobody knows, including him. I hope that whoever the president is in such a circumstance would not act hastily, despite the pressure to do so. This movie is scary as hell.

Movies like “The Sum of All Fears” and “Fail Safe” have depicted this kind of scenario before, but this movie looks at it from a different angle. What if a missile is headed for an American city and our leaders don't know who fired the missile, or why? In Fail Safe, the city of New York is sacrificed after the U.S. accidentally blows up Moscow. That sort of straightforward choice doesn't seem to available in this story.

This movie is set up in chapters, showing the same series of events from the point of view of different characters, including one from the standpoint of the President of the United States, played by Idris Elba of “Three Thousand Years of Longing.” Another chapter of the movie follows events as seen by military leaders and those in the Situation Room, and another from the point of view of Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson of “Mission: Impossible - Fallout”) oversight officer for the White House Situation Room.

The Secretary of Defense Reid Baker (Jared Harris of “Morbius”) and General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts of “Little Women”) of United States Strategic Command argue for a rapid military response to the attack, saying it is a matter of national survival. Others argue for less hasty response, on the theory that the missile might not explode at all.

While the three-part structure of the movie, rewinding in time to the beginning of the day in each chapter, does delay the suspense at times, it doesn't really give away the climax, because the ending is ambiguous. I'm not a fan of this kind of ambiguity, but it works well enough here.

The acting is first-rate in this movie, especially by Rebecca Ferguson and Jared Harris. The actors do a marvelous job of showing how people might behave in a situation where there is not enough time, or enough information available to make a good decision, and all the options are bad ones. This movie shows us that we need the best people available to make decisions like this. Given the level of incompetence in the U.S. government right now, lets just hope nothing like this happens anytime soon.

It is easy to quibble over details in a story like this, but overall, it is a suspenseful effective movie. It updates the nuclear Armageddon story to account for nuclear proliferation in a previously unexplored way. This movie rates a B.

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