Netflix has strongly pushed their new thriller: A House of Dynamite. This weekend, Mrs. Greenbean left me alone and unsurprised while she traveled with one of the sprouts. That meant Sunday night after all my work was completed, I had time to relax. How did I choose to spend my relaxation time?

Oh, of course. I decided to watch a movie about nuclear war. So relaxing.

I liked the movie overall, and rate it as an above average Netflix film, but you need to know that is a low bar. I mean, I remember Bird Box.

Kathryn Bigelow knows how to tell a story, and she moves AHOD along very well. There is no real violence on screen and zero sexual content. The only thing that gets in the way of this being a clean movie is the language. There is foul language throughout. To enjoy this movie, you have to have a certain taste for radar screens, situation rooms, and lots of beauty shots of Washington D.C. Most people seem to like it, for as I write this, it is pushing an upper 70s on Rotten Tomatoes, so, may people are feeling okay with the movie.

Without spoiling it — and basically following what you would get from any preview — the premise of AHOD is that a nuclear missile is headed toward the United States. The movie is the reaction to that situation.

I’ll build this review around my old trusted method — What I really liked, what was okay, and what was awful.

I liked the pacing. Bigelow builds the story around about forty minutes of action and then tells that same story from three different perspectives. The first is from the perspective of the field operations personnel, the nuts and bolts people doing the work. Then when that ends, it switches to the next level up, the leadership of our nation at intelligence, national security, and the military. The last vignette is that same forty minutes from the perspective of the President of the United States and those around him. This story telling methodology could be clunky and overwrought, but in was done just perfect in AHOD.

I also liked in this film the compete lack of politics. It would have been so easy and tempting to insert a political ideology into the characters, especially when so many of them would have been political in nature. However, that is not even something that comes out through any of this. These people could be republicans, democrats, or anything in between. Well done. Because in this kind of scenario, your views on taxation or immigration really doesn’t mean much.

I also liked the way the film portrays an undercurrent of something like, ‘once this trigger event starts, there is a cascading ordering of events that makes the next step inevitable.’ As a storyteller, I really appreciated that level energy.

The acting was okay. There are great actors in this movie, for sure but I was deeply annoyed by two accent issues. Rebecca Ferguson, who I really like, and Idris Elba, who I really like, both play Americans. Elba actually portrays POTUS. Each one of them fall into their British accent more than once. It was distracting and it made me wonder two things. Thing one — were no Americans available? Thing two — why not, when hearing that accent, did they not reshoot the image or edit it a little better.

But that aside, the acting was quite brilliant. I especially tip my hat to all those actors I had never seen or heard of before in the early scenes when things are just starting. They are portraying the various military personnel who monitor and watch. Those folks did great.

Okay, all the cards on the table, nothing was that awful. But it was unfortunate that there were some threads of narrative that seemed to be developing, and then . . . nothing. There is a FEMA official who seems like something important is going to happen through her and . . . nothing. Same with a bomber wing flying out over the Pacific. It looks like a significant storyline but . . . nothing. There are about four or five of these hooks with no barb.

The second almost awful is the lack of range in the film. It is an almost two hour movie and I don’t remember laughing or chuckling even once. Yes, I know it is serious, but human beings are funny. The mounting pressure of the moment would have been intensified and made more stark had there been a clever use of humor, maybe once in each of the three vignettes.

One more thing in the ‘awful’ category that is not really awful but just off-putting. The first minute or so of the film is unnecessarily wordy. It has a prologue that is designed to sound like something from the real world that is informing the made up movie we are about watch, but it really isn’t. It is a primer to set us on edge before the action starts. The movie is good enough that doesn’t need this. Just roll the film.

The feel of AHOD is at times like a Jack Ryan movie, or maybe the backdrop of a Mission Impossible film. It definitely has that vibe. I kept thinking of Dr. Strangelove but without the biting irony and sarcasm. There is a moment when Elba says to one of his advisors that the course of action being told to him is ‘insanity’ and I thought of that famous line, ‘You can’t fight in here, this is the war room.’ None of it makes any sense. Nuclear weapons don’t make sense. Neither does war.

If you check the chatter about AHOD, lots of folks seem to be puzzled by the ending. I was not. The ending made perfect sense to me in real time. I will not give it away, as I said, no spoilers, but if you’ve followed the way the movie is set up then the ending is really the one way it could end.

Speaking of the end, one of the things you walk away from is, how real is this? Could this happen. My take is, no way this could actually go down like this. It is thrilling and terrifying to think of, but there must be so many safeguards which would ruin an otherwise good film. If you’d like a deeper dive into the realism of the scenario, click here for a fun article from NPR that talks to national security experts.