Anthony Ramos, like most Latinos, is a man of many talents. The New-York-born Puerto Rican is a singer/songwriter with three albums to his credit, part of one of the most awarded Broadway shows in Hamilton (with fellow Latino Lin-Manuel Miranda), and close to three dozen acting credits to his name. For his latest, Ramos is helping to save the world from imminent disaster in Netflix’s A House of Dynamite, directed by Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow.
In A House of Dynamite, Ramos is Major Daniel Gonzalez, a soldier stationed in the far reaches of Alaska. He’s among the very first to spot a missile headed straight for the U.S.A. And once he sees it, there are a lot of questions: What is the missile? Where is it going? Where did it come from? Is it real or a training exercise?
Spoiler alert: the answers are not forthcoming. What follows is 18 minutes of terror, panic and more questions than time allows for. And, it does so on repeat! The film portrays the same 18 minutes from three separate perspectives.
The first chapter follows the group who identify the missile, the second focuses on those inside stratcom, and the film ends with the perspective of the President of the United States.
Ramos represents real-life military personnel who would be the first to identify the situation. “These guys [are part of] a rotation of people – they sit in front of screens all day long and all night and watch, while we’re out here eating our little croissant and drinking our little latte. They’re in front of their shit like this,” says Ramos hours before the film made its premiere at the New York Film Festival. “They’re monitoring this all day long.”
The film is designed to be disorienting, dramatic, and, of course, thought-provoking. Over the course of its two hours, what becomes quite evident is that while there are those in our government whose entire job is to prepare for such an event, the final decision falls solely on the President of the United States – who in this case is played by Idris Elba.
Bigelow and writer Noah Oppenheim took great care with accuracy in A House of Dynamite, interviewing experts, including one who shared that presidents don’t have much preparation for deciding what to do if the U.S. faces a nuclear threat. Both Oppenheim and Bigelow report that their sources told them that any president who takes office is given only a very short briefing on the nuclear football. You know, the ones that carry the codes to launch our nuclear arsenal? Bigelow said, it’s “less than an hour sometimes. And that’s it.”
“And then they don’t think about it ever again,” says Oppenheim. “And so the fact that the folks at the top of the decision-making ladder, the president, the secretary of defense, might be the least prepared for the moment, I think was stunning to both of us.”
Though there are people who “practice the protocol for nuclear weapons 400 times a year. On the other hand, the president is not,” says Bigelow.
Ramos told us that he spent a great deal of time with the soldiers in Greenly, Alaska. “I think it was pretty relieving when they watched us do the performance. And the guys came up to us and were like, ‘dang, like you guys took us there,’” said the Hamilton star. “They’re like, ‘you guys really made us feel how it feels for us.’ So yeah, we had a lot of help, thank God.”
A House of Dynamite is everything you would expect from Kathryn Bigelow. It’s panic-inducing and brings forth complex questions around the use of nuclear weapons. And yes, admittedly, I likely liked it more because there is a Latino in a pivotal and heroic role. But honestly, the film really should come with a side of Xanax-dusted popcorn – it is that dramatic and that good.
