If a nuclear missile was heading – unstoppably, irrevocably – towards an American city, what could possibly be the next move? It’s a question most action thrillers get to avoid, their heroes saving the day just before a launch (or, if they’re a bit goofier, knocking a missile out of the sky somehow), but the only one on the mind of A House of Dynamite, Kathryn Bigelow’s terrifying comeback after an eight year absence from filmmaking. Starting with the reveal that an unknown party has launched a nuke from somewhere in the Pacific and only getting more apocalyptically tense from there, it’s a brilliant, gripping state-of-the-nation address just let down at the very end.
From launch to projected impact (the target is eventually confirmed to be Chicago), there’s only 19 minutes, so Bigelow and her incredibly fittingly-named writer Noah Oppenheim take us through these moments from multiple perspectives, constantly winding back the clock just as the doomsday moment arrives. We start at the lower levels of power but higher levels of competence (Oppenheim eerily shows how being closer to the levers of decision-making is a privilege often reserved for exclusively the non-experts), gradually making our way up the ranks until the final segment follows the President himself.
Our first perspectives are as boots-on-the-ground as possible – a missile interception station in a remote Alaskan landscape that already looks like the world might have ended and the officer in charge of the White House Situation Room, Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson). Even these pure professionals, initially shaking off the reports as surely some sort of mistake, eventually turn to quivering panic as countermeasures fail, their nauseating fear absolutely infectious. Bigelow and DP Barry Ackroyd keep their cameras intimate and mobile, a sense of chaotic claustrophobia making the tension and stress that much more all-encompassing, all buoyed by a bubbling, droning end-of-days score from Volker Bertelmann.
You might think that, upon the first rewind, there would then be a case of diminishing returns, but A House of Dynamite stays horrifying from every perspective as we go up the chain to a nuclear-command general (Tracy Letts), a young-but-influential National Security adviser (Gabriel Basso), the Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris), and the President (Idris Elba). All the performances are solid, evoking (fittingly for Harris) the mix of human emotional crisis and professional competency of HBO’s Chernobyl series, though the President character does feel a bit like a cop out. In a world that is otherwise an exact model of ours (the geopolitical situation has Russia sanctioned and stuck in a quagmire in Ukraine, WNBA star Angel Reese appears as herself), the narrative difficulties imposed by having a mad, senile fascist Trump stand-in are simply elided.
Elba instead plays his President (having already played the UK PM earlier this year in action-comedy Heads of State) as a sort of mix of Clinton and Obama, and though he is undeniably effective as the man who must the final decision as to how to retaliate (and who to even retaliate against), this easy way out does stain this final chapter. As plans to kill tens of millions of people are drawn up and debated, A House of Dynamite doesn’t just not stick the landing, it actually just keeps flying by, a pure anticlimax that had me leaving completely deflated.
Yet, as crucial as these final minutes are, it is important to remember that it only comes unstuck in the literal last two minutes of what is a two *hour* film. Before that, A House of Dynamite is an incredible reminder of exactly what we’ve been missing with Bigelow out of the cinematic landscape. It’s endlessly scary and stressful, never feels anything less than completely authentic, and serves as a reminder of how few human mistakes we are from complete armageddon. As one general reminds the president; though it feels like insanity, this is reality, and it’s a nightmare.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 