VENICE – The first feature film in nearly 10 years from Kathryn Bigelow, the provocateur behind “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” begins with the silhouettes of soldiers carrying machine guns against the pink of a rising sun.

“At the end of the cold war, global power reached the consensus that the world would be better off with fewer nuclear weapons,” reads the text on screen, which goes black as tense music builds before more words appear.

“That era is now over.”

Bigelow’s gripping “A House of Dynamite,” about a race against time before total nuclear annihilation, had an entire theater full of press and industry professionals on the edge of their seats Tuesday. The star-packed, almost documentary-like thriller, which opens in theaters Oct. 10 before streaming on Netflix on Oct. 24, starts off with three characters: a soldier (Anthony Ramos) at the 49th Missile Defense Battalion in Fort Greely, Alaska, who is having a bad morning; a young mother (Rebecca Ferguson) playing with her kid before heading to work in the White House Situation Room; and a new Federal Emergency Management Agency employee (Moses Ingram), who has just learned her prenuptial is “ironclad,” a tomorrow problem she can’t deal with right now if she wants to keep her job. They’re just the tip of a vast web of competent people whose lives will be upended when a nuclear missile of unknown origin is spotted over the South Pacific, on a trajectory to reach the United States in just 19 minutes.

Written by former NBC News president Noah Oppenheim – who reported on multiple presidential elections as well as from North Korea, Russia, Iraq, Israel and Libya, before turning to writing scripts such as 2016’s “Jackie” – the thriller projects a deep authenticity that may draw praise from government and military circles. His research involved talking to current and former military officials across multiple administrations; drawing on sources from the Pentagon, CIA and White House and visiting the White House Situation Room and the headquarters of U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) on an Air Force base in Nebraska – which oversees Defense Department control of nuclear and missile defense operations. (The STRATCOM headquarters in the movie are a copy of the space they saw, which very few film crews have ever been allowed to enter.)

“From the very beginning, [Bigelow’s] mandate was, let’s find out how this would really work,” Oppenheim said at aVenice news conference Tuesday following the press screening. “Let’s take people into these rooms where these decisions would be made and show how it would actually unfold.”

Oppenheim said he learned from the people who run the U.S. military defense system that the chance of a ground-based interceptor (GBI) actually neutralizing an incoming intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is – as Jared Harris’s defense secretary screams into a Zoom call during the film – “a coin toss!” Or, as Gabriel Basso’s deputy national security adviser puts it, “trying to hit a bullet with a bullet.”

Bigelow said in the news conference that she hadn’t made a feature film since 2017’s “Detroit” because she hadn’t felt enough passion for a subject until this one. But the 73-year-old Oscar winner hadgrown up in an era when kids were taught to hide under their desk as protection from a nuclear attack, and she had become alarmed at how that possibility has essentially fallen out of public consciousness. The threat of nuclear war has only increased, she said, particularly because only three of the nine countries with nuclear warheads are members of NATO.

She started to feel that it was important to put some heat on the global issue of our nuclear stockpile and how dangerous it really is. As one character describes it in the film, it’s as if all of these countries have built “a house of dynamite,” and then we moved into it and have just been living there, blithely, without remembering that it could explode at any moment.

“The story we’re trying to tell reflects, really, the reality of our world since the dawn of the nuclear age, as soon as these weapons were developed,” Oppenheim said. “The point is that no matter what’s going on in the world, and the world’s always unstable in some way or another, we’ve constructed this weaponry that could end all life.”

Why, when we’ve seen the horrific destruction that nuclear detonations wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, do these weapons still exist?

The movie plays out in three parts, covering the same 20 minutes from the perspective of clusters of decision-makers. We start with the information gatherers, the soldiers at a missile defense headquarters who sound the alarm, and the situation room and FEMA employees in charge of taking that information and conveying it to the right people. Then we start getting into military and government command, and finally we’re with the president (Idris Elba) and the military aide carrying the nuclear football (Jonah Hauer-King of “The Little Mermaid”). Do they wait to see if the missile is real? If it’s faulty?Or do they launch their own preemptive strike and potentially obliterate humanity?

The antagonist, Bigelow said, is intentionally ambiguous to allow for internal reflection. Could we really call this system “nuclear defense” in a scenario in which we don’t even know who the enemy is?

And they were purposeful about peppering the film with human moments. The national security adviser is under anesthesia, having a colonoscopy; the North Korea expert (Greta Lee) is on her day off at a Gettysburg reenactment with her son; and the deputy national security adviser (Basso of “The Night Agent”) breaks down while talking to POTUS as he thinks about his pregnant wife.

“I mean, the movie could be performed as purely procedural, and we simply see people doing their jobs and nothing but their jobs,” said Tracy Letts, who plays a general at STRATCOM. “But the truth is, they’re human beings performing these functions, and [humanity] pops out in unusual ways and at unusual times.”

While they started writing two years ago, Oppenheim said the filmmakers weren’t thinking about any particular U.S. presidency or geopolitical dynamics. But it’s impossible not to think of current and past U.S. leadership while watching this movie, given that Elba plays the president, and his chic, smart wife, who’s in Kenya on a save-the-elephants mission, is played by Renée Elise Goldsberry.

“So many of these weapons are on a hair trigger system in countries like ours, [and] one individual, the president, has the sole authority to authorize their use,” Oppenheim emphasizes.

A reporter pointed out that the United States seems very isolated in the momentdepicted on screen. Authorities attempt to make contact with adversarial countries (Russia, China, North Korea) they believe might be responsible but never reach out to their allies. That, too, Bigelow said, was based on conversations with people who had been in those rooms. “So that is evidence of … perhaps an isolationist approach. And it’s good to point out and good to be aware of, for sure,” she said.

In many ways, this film can be considered part of a trilogy of Bigelow’s exploration of human beings under incredibly tense circumstances of global political import. First she explored insurgency, and combating it, in Iraq with 2008’s “The Hurt Locker” because she felt like no one had a good picture of what was actually happening. Then she took on a woman on an obsessive search for Osama bin Laden in 2012’s “Zero Dark Thirty” because Bigelow had spoken with 9/11 families and realized many of them had no idea what had happened in the 10 years since the attack – and we were still taking off our shoes in airports. In “A House of Dynamite,” she said, “I personally wanted to know where we are with the nuclear stockpile, and how volatile it is, and who’s taking care of it.”

Her solution, Bigelow said, would be to reduce the nuclear stockpile. “My greatest hope is that we actually initiate a conversation about nuclear weapons and nonproliferation,” she said.

But in the meantime, all she could do was illuminate who’s in charge if something dire goes wrong. “It turns out that it’s these incredibly competent people operating in an infinitesimally short timeline,” she said. “And it’s only the fate of the world that’s at stake.”