Kathryn Bigelow really does just loves to keep us on edge, doesn’t she? If it’s not peeking over the shoulders of bomb disposal experts during the Iraq war, she has us following those on the trail of Osama bin Laden – but it seems that in her latest endeavour, the director is taking her latest chain of command thriller to the most extreme conclusion: The threat of nuclear devestation.
Having an atomic holocaust hanging over the heads of the world’s population is not exactly a rarity of a concept – in fact, the full range of emotions it can elicit goes from terrifyingly funny (Stanley Krubrick’s Dr. Stranglove) to just plain terrifying (Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe), and that’s not even including the multitude of films that use the spectre of annihilation as a threat that includes anything from Crimson Tide to Miracle Mile. However, in this instance, Bigelow isn’t interested so much in the whys and the wherefores, but rather than the minutiae of what actually happens when a wayward missile is launched at the US. However, by keeping things relentlessly ambiguous, is Bigelow trying too hard to avoid taking some kind of political stance?
As Captain Olivia Walker starts another day at work as the oversight officer for the White House situation room, she sifts through the several geopolitical developments that are waiting for her to start her shift. However, such matters as suspicious chatter from Iran, military exercises by the People’s Liberation Army of China, and relative silence from Korea after a recent ballistics missile test, all start to take possibly sinister connotations when a worrying blip shows up on a radar screen. It seems that there’s an unidentified ICBM in the air that’s been launched from destinations unknown, and after being picked up by early warning radar, matters get infinitely more serious when it enters low orbit. Based on its trajectory, it’s due to hit Chicago and its going to do it in twenty short minutes.
From here we experience a bunch of people in various positions attempt to break down this potentially lethal happening and try to figure out what exactly is going on. As the radar managed to miss the launch, there’s no way of knowing who is responsible for it and without this knowledge, there’s no way to know exactly how to respond. From the radar operators who first discover it and prep ground based interceptors to take out the missile, all the way up to the President Of The United States, we follow the occurance from the points of view of numerous people involved. But while the notion of a random nuke fired at a global superpower is scary enough, what’s truly horrifying is how no one seems to have a concrete response to such an unprecedented act.
But when you take into account even more variables (accidental malfunction, the warhead may not actually detonate), the chance of those involved making the exact right decision becomes terrifyingly remote.
If I had to come up with a snappy slogan to describe my feelings on A House Of Dynamite, I suppose “nuclear marmite” is as good as any. While there’s some people who will feverishly applaud the numerous, ballsy directorial and narrative decisions that Bigelow has chosen to ensure her sobering point is made (repelling any type of nuclear attack is basically a fucking crapshoot), others will not doubt be incredibly frustrated about the the movie’s unwillingness to take any real-life stance whatsoever. With no way of knowing where the missile has come from or which country has launched it, the movie essentially has no antagonist other than the chilling potential of nuclear destruction. From there, the film somehow manages to get even more ambiguous as even the final results are removed from the equation just so Bigalow has us trapped in the sweat inducing panic of a twenty minute countdown with no easy answers to fall back on.
It’s an audacious idea that is ruthless about shoving our faces into just how hard it is to remove a ICBM from the board when it’s screaming toward a fateful meeting with the windy city, especially when you see exactly how many people have to be brought in to make even a single, rock solid decision. However, while the idea works beautifully for the first third of its runtime, once we get to the moment seconds before impact, Bigalow winds back the clock and starts again, this time showing the entire event through the eyes of characters who were only bit-part players the first time round. But once we reach the end this time, we rewind once more and we replay it a third time from the vantage point of people higher up the ladder – and here lies A House Of Dynamite’s most egregious flaw. Simply put, by the time we go for a third go around, a lot of that initial tension has dissipated simply because we we’ve already seen the bulk of this two times before and while it allows Bigalow to squeeze in her immence amount of players, those desperate for some amount of clear resolution are going to be severely pissed by the end.
That’s not to say that we don’t get good stuff. Bigalow can wring tension out of military speak like no other filmmaker on earth and it allows her sprawling cast to get their shots in before the spotlight moves on to other people. Rebecca Ferguson tries to keep a crumbling game-face together as the clock ticks down, Idris Elba’s POTUS looks continually flabbergasted that no one can give him a straight answer on anything, Anthony Ramos’ NORTHCOM chief tries to contend with doing everything by the book and still ending up tasting the ashes of failure and Jared Harris’ Secretary of Defence struggles with the knowledge that he may never get to reconcile with his estranged, Chicago-dwelling daughter. It’s all remorselessly sobering stuff and you literally feel your stomach drop everytime the DEFCOM level travels ever upward. But there’s also a sense that in her efforts to show us how ineffectual every seems to be, Bigelow is more interested in terrifying the shit out of us repeatedly making the point that “war is bad” via the route of “we’re all fucked”.
When A House Of Dynamite is cooking, it works overtime to get those hairs on the back of your neck standing on end, especially when we see that the people whose job it is to thwart such an event are just are freaked out as we would be if we just happened to walk in and see DEFCOM1 suddenly light up on the wall in front of us. And yet, despite the talents of all involved, Bigelow can’t seem to find anything new to say, and rather than convincing the world to step away from the brink, it just gives us yet more reasons to be mindlessly scared.
If Bigelow set out to make A House Of Dynamite simply to scare the living crap out of us, then consider it mission: accomplished (for the first third at least). However, while her grip on tension remains unsurpassed, the film ends up being it’s own worst enemy as the exact things that make it so effective are the same things that’ll piss off people demanding a simple payoff, rather than a payload. Here comes the boom.
🌟🌟🌟