Jupiter heads to Venice: it’s set in a real French nuclear bunker

Alexandre Smia’s political thriller Jupiter is headed to this year’s Venice Film Festival for a world premiere out of competition. It’s Smia’s first feature, and he’s starting big: a newly elected French president is thrown into a crisis that could slide into nuclear war with Russia.

IMDb Download

The film’s hook is how grounded it sounds. Jupiter takes place in the actual Jupiter Command Post, the underground bunker beneath the Élysée Palace, and Smia is treating it as a film about nuclear authority, responsibility, isolation, procedure, architecture, and confinement. His phrase for the moment we’re living in is a “Third Nuclear Age.” In that setting, the weight of command matters more than spectacle.

Smia started writing Jupiter while Joe Biden was still president of the United States. Now the film lands after the Ukraine war reportedly shaped its development, with the February 2026 expiration of the New START nuclear arms treaty in view, and with fresh anxiety over miscalculation, accidental escalation, black swan events, and a world that still holds more than 12,500 warheads across nine nuclear states.

If smart, systems-driven political thrillers are your thing, Jupiter looks like one to seek out for its research-heavy procedural take on what nuclear war feels like inside the room where that decision gets made. First stop: the Venice Film Festival.