Who can forget Hurt Locker? And I have commented elsewhere that Zero Dark Thirty is genuinely remarkable. It’s not a secret that I generally despise movies made by streamers, but for these two portfolio-ck reasons, I held out hope that House of Dynamite would be excellent.

To be sure, it passes the time. That’s the main requirement I have for movies these days. And it succeeds in passing the time divertingly. I’m actually surprised how late it got without me noticing.

But in the time that passed between when the project started to the time it was released, we have seen a tremendous shift in the decisiveness of American leadership at the top. So the whole movie feels less than excellent.

There is a fairly viral video of candidate Trump, and his team at the time, watching the DNC Harris speech together, wherein we got to see an intimate portrait of these people at work. If you haven’t watched it, here’s a link to one dude’s clip of it.

The overall point is, politics aside, the man running the show is decisive. Sure, TACO is a real criticism on some level, but it’s difficult to measure because it is reasonable that many TACO events are only TACO-narrative-feeders if the timeline is the incorrect length. Not to mention, TACO is more about matching talk to walk, not walk as opposed to stay still. Or “paralysis by analysis” as some pilots would say.

For this movie review’s point, which is inescapably a review of the concept of reacting to a nuclear attack on America, President Trump and his team—again, regardless of the politics—will be decisive and with a speed that impresses even “high functioning” people. This belief was actually comforting during the film.

In short, while Bigelow’s movie intends on illustrating that Earth truly is a house of dynamite—the description is not merely a metaphor—it fails. This is because the leaders—metaphorical fathers?—in the film are portrayed as “indecisive and low IQ”. (Except the interrogator guy from ZDT. He gets my vote for who should be in charge.)

Put another way, could someone please make a movie based on the exact same scenario, but show how it would play out when decisive leaders are in charge? That version would be far more interesting to see. And it would naturally offer an actual answer to the still-compelling question, “Do we live in a house of dynamite?”