Kathryn Bigelow wastes no time getting “A House of Dynamite” moving — it’s just go, go, go. A propulsive thriller, her latest movie hinges on a potential nuclear catastrophe of such annihilating magnitude that it seems almost inconceivable, despite being altogether credible. Ordinary life, after all, is tough enough without contemplating the truth that at any second someone, somewhere — in North Korea, say, or in France, Russia or the United States — could set off a nuclear strike. It’s no wonder that the specter of the world’s end has inspired so few memorable films. The reality is unspeakably grim and unbearably absurd.
“Heck, I reckon you wouldn’t even be human beings if you didn’t have some pretty strong personal feelings about nuclear combat,” as a character says in Stanley Kubrick’s savage 1964 doomsday satire “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”
Few jokes and smiles are cracked in “A House of Dynamite,” a deadly serious what-if movie that follows American government and military personnel, among others, after an unidentified ballistic missile enters national airspace. This sighting raises eyebrows but doesn’t seem to alarm anyone all that much, including General Brady (Tracy Letts), who’s more interested in chatting about last night’s ballgame. Things happen, blips pop up on radar screens and reassuringly competent professionals briskly get to work to save us, or that’s the hope. Elsewhere, Admiral Miller (Jason Clarke) tells a subordinate, “Give me a shout-out if the world’s going to end,” before strolling back to his desk in the White House Situation Room.
This calm vanishes with startling abruptness. One minute, everyone is slurping coffee and exchanging pleasantries while revving up for another day of maintaining national security. The tempo and texture of their chatter seems routine, whether someone is joking about a colleague’s marriage proposal or name-checking Iran and North Korea. The next minute, though, someone announces that the missile is about to go suborbital and will hit the United States, and the world shifts on its axis. Everything — the chatter, gestures, movements and the movie’s pacing — accelerates as the ordinary gives way to the extraordinary. It’s tense and eerie, and then the story stops, only to restart from another vantage point.
Written by Noah Oppenheim, “A House of Dynamite” is divided into separate sections that advance the narrative from different angles. The first section situates you geographically and otherwise as the story jumps among characters and locations. Dawn is breaking in Fort Greely, Alaska — a missile defense launch site — where Maj. Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) fields a personal mobile call before settling in to oversee other soldiers intently monitoring screens. It’s the middle of the night in D.C. when the brisk, no-nonsense Capt. Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) says goodbye to her husband and toddler before heading to the Situation Room. One of the givens, however simplistic, is that everyone is just doing their job and serving the country; the lack of overt partisan politics feels quaintly old-fashioned.
With speed and focus, the movie soon pulls you in further, as does the expansive cast. Although Idris Elba has top billing (he plays the president, code name Icon), and some performers have more substantial roles than others, there’s no central protagonist. The first section introduces dozens of characters, some of whom turn out to be relatively inconsequential. A wide-eyed White House newbie (Willa Fitzgerald) seems on hand mostly to look confused by the armed personnel swarming the White House to sweep away to ostensible safety those designated worth saving. The fumbling, humorously tardy deputy national security adviser, Jake (Gabriel Basso), by contrast, is soon on a nerve-thwacking call with Russia.
American cinema has long been hooked on disaster, on near-misses and last-ditch saves, epically sized and not; violence is good for business, and so are cheap heroics. That has only intensified over the past few decades, accelerated by the rise of the superhero flicks, with their endless wars and orgiastic violence. Bigelow, a virtuoso of complex action cinema, has directed her share of movies about catastrophes, including “K-19: The Widowmaker” (2002), a nail-biter that revisits a queasily real 1961 accident on a nuclear-powered Soviet submarine. That film flopped, but she continued making movies about extreme situations and characters on the edge, notably “The Hurt Locker” (2009), about American soldiers in Iraq.
Bigelow’s work here is superb. She puts the many moving parts into coordinated place and keeps them coherently spinning even as she switches out some elements and introduces others; she doesn’t drop a single plate. The script occasionally gets in her way, which sometimes happens in her work, notably whenever the movie tries to personalize the catastrophe with some human-interest exchanges. As the crisis escalates, characters reach out to one another and the secretary of defense (a strong Jared Harris) checks in with his daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) in an awkward, unpersuasive scene. Far more effective are those instances when the camera holds on characters in moments of clenched silence.
In the main, Bigelow is less interested in pumping tears, much less in waving any flags, than in freaking you out, which she does from the get-go with a blare of brassy instrumentals and some scary text about nuclear weapons that jumps off the screen like a shriek. So, how plausible is “A House of Dynamite?” I checked: On Jan. 28, the nonprofit Bulletin of Atomic Scientists reset the hands on its Doomsday Clock closer to midnight. A blunt graphical representation of how close humans are to destroying themselves, the clock was created in 1947, two years after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The clock was set at seven minutes to midnight; it’s now at 89 seconds to midnight.
The movie itself can feel like a doomsday clock that’s fast running out, what with its racing pace, restless camerawork, propelling editing and many flashing electronic displays. (The director of photography is Barry Ackroyd, who also shot “The Hurt Locker,” and the editor is Kirk Baxter.) Even when the story loops back in time to repeatedly reset the narrative clock, as it were, or when Bigelow pauses for a scene-enriching detail — like Walker finding a child’s tiny figurine nestled in one of her high-heels — she sustains a powerful sense of forward momentum that takes hold of your whole body. She’s making an argument about the world as it is and could be, and she’s making it largely in purely cinematic terms, not speeches.
“A House of Dynamite” is a relief after Bigelow’s disappointing last movie, “Detroit” (2017), about the civil unrest that rocked that city in 1967. Her new movie is also factually grounded, as the names of the assorted advisers listed in the credits underscore, but it is also (so far!) a work of speculative fiction. What Bigelow couldn’t have known, I assume, is how it would play in the midst of an American government shutdown and during a period of great national upheaval. I imagine that when she started on “A House of Dynamite,” her models were sober works of realism about the nuclear threat, like Sidney Lumet’s 1964 “Fail Safe,” a cautionary film that appeals both to the audience’s intelligence and its reason. Who could have known that by the time Bigelow’s movie opened, reality would look more like “Dr. Strangelove”?
A House of Dynamite
Rated R for guns and the specter of mass death. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
The post ‘A House of Dynamite’ Review: Kathryn Bigelow’s Alarming Command and Control appeared first on New York Times.
