A House of Dynamite: A Repetitive Doomsday Thriller

Eight years following 2017’s Detroit, Academy Award winning filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow returns with a bang in her latest film, A House of Dynamite. Continuing on in the tradition of her 21^st century work, it delivers another tense, government-driven thriller, this time built around a fictional event. When a single, unattributed nuclear missile is launched at the United States, all branches of the executive chain have to scramble to determine what’s going on, and how best to respond.

A House of Dynamite purports to be the most realistic procedural look into what would actually happen behind the scenes at the White House if a nuclear missile was headed stateside, with a script by Noah Oppenheim, former executive and producer of NBC’s Today Show whose background would lend to a great familiarity with the various branches of government and those involved. Unfolding in real time, the film follows the 18-20 minutes that the government would have to understand, mobilize, and respond to an incoming nuclear attack. And as the countdown reaches zero, it goes back to explore the same situation from a series of perspectives, highlighting the levels of authority that would be implicated in such a doomsday scenario, climbing the chain of command from the soldiers and officers in the Situation Room up to Air Force One and the President of the United States (Idris Elba).

Shot in a faux-documentary handheld style, Bigelow strips out all the usual cinematic flair, putting audiences in the frantic but orderly pace of these institutions. Meanwhile, Oppenheim’s script impressively balances both the needs of verisimilitude in depicting a believable workplace with “real professionals” operating, and the needs of having to explain protocol, phrases, and general knowledge that the characters in film would already know to audiences by way of endless exposition, while still feeling authentic and not overwhelming them with information. Prior to the countdown clock forcing every one in this immensely sprawling cast to zero in on the crisis, the film offers up little snippets of their lives at the start of each section, the calm before the storm which gets peppered in throughout the time crunch for added dramatic effect.

That being said, the structural gamesmanship on display makes a lot of sense on paper. If one is dedicated to full realism of how long it would actually take for a missile to reach the United States, it is hard to make a feature length film around that without stretching the ticking clock out, so it has to cut between the various branches of government and personnel involved, siphoned off into their own distinct sections. What this ends up doing, in practice, is deflate almost all the tension and momentum the film so effectively conjures up and keeps resetting to zero. By design, its characters are all fairly thin markers, more of position than people and while the film occasionally mingles its human drama into the proceedings, much of it is too broad and generic to register beyond accepted “disaster movie” tropes.

Jared Harris’ Secretary of Defense Reid Baker is the highlight, as he struggles with what to do or tell his family living in the predicted strike zone, stuck between his capacities as a father and his official duties. However, the film truly peaks in its opening section, one where Rebecca Ferguson’s Captain Olivia Walker is the first character to experience the launching of the missile, not knowing how it will all play out and starting the chain of events that followed. Initially, the idea of seeing subsequent characters appear on the other side of screens, ones whose perspectives takes over the later sections of the film, is intriguing but ultimately ends up feeling like arguments, scenarios, and dialogues audiences have already heard before, but with the camera now focused on the other half of the call. This decision is most felt during the third section’s focus on Elba’s POTUS, first a mysterious voice that dominates the film up to that point and whose respective section ultimately does very little in relation to his total screentime, merely just putting a face to a voice.

Ultimately, one can’t help but wish the film had ditched its overreliance on its overreliance on real time realism, instead favoring a linear structure cutting between its gargantuan cast throughout to emphasize the overwhelming density and scope of such an operation through to the end. The cast, in their own right, is uniformly excellent, as Bigelow wrings out as much tension as she can, however, there is only so much to do when essentially replaying the same event over and over. All things considered, the final outcome is one that will surely be largely contested and be the subject of countless debates.

In the end, if director Kathryn Bigelow’s film is about anything, then it is about a system of checks and balances where, even if everyone across the chain of command acts professionally and does their job as expected, it is still woefully unprepared to grapple with the actual realities of nuclear war…and that’s with no one messing up! A House of Dynamite, at its best, is a tense, and scary “what if” scenario that is unfortunately held back by a structure that quickly grows repetitive and undermines the red hot tension that Bigelow brings to it. For better or worse, this House of Dynamite hits with more of a whimper than a bang.

still courtesy of Netflix

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Alex Josevski

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