As if we didn’t have enough to worry about these days, “A House of Dynamite,” the crackling new thriller from director Kathryn Bigelow, wants to add one more fear to keep us up at night — the specter of atomic annihilation.
You may be old enough to remember when nuclear anxiety was No. 1 on the hit parade of humanity’s greatest concerns. Bigelow’s new movie, her first in eight years, wants to remind us that the warheads haven’t gone anywhere. In fact, with the world becoming more chaotic and unstable, the threat they pose, the film argues, is graver than ever.
Unimaginable, you say. “A House of Dynamite” asks us to imagine it.
To be precise, it asks us to imagine it repeatedly as the movie is divided into three sections, each focusing on a different and sometimes overlapping set of people responding to the fact that a nuclear missile of unknown origin has launched somewhere in the Pacific and is heading toward the American Midwest, probably Chicago. Unless it is stopped in about 18 minutes, some 10 million people will die.
The first section bounces between a U.S. missile defense center in Alaska, where Maj. David Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) and his team first notice the missile and are charged with intercepting it, and the White House Situation Room, a flurry of activity and cascading panic. Senior duty officer Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) and her boss, Adm. Mark Miller (Jason Clarke), try to process the information as quickly as possible but there’s not a lot of time. Impact is just minutes away.
When the movie reboots to its second section, rewinding the clock, we view the crisis through the prism of a possible military response as a hawkish general (Tracy Letts) debates a deputy security advisor (Gabriel Basso) about who might have fired the missile. A desperate North Korea? Russia, trying to sow chaos? Maybe it’s a coordinated attack from an alliance of adversaries?
Stopping the nuke would give them more time to gather intelligence, but we learn there’s only a 61% chance of intercepting it. “It’s like hitting a bullet with a bullet,” someone says, crushing the naive notion of an impregnable “nuclear defense.”
“So it’s a f— coin toss?” the bewildered secretary of Defense (Jared Harris) asks, incredulously. “That’s what $50 billion buys us?”
Harris and other key players are often seen interacting with each other on a segmented video screen — that’s one Zoom meeting you really don’t want to be invited to. Notably unseen, the box being blank, is the U.S. president (Idris Elba), who we hear but don’t meet until the movie’s third section. Seemingly new to the job, POTUS, presented as a level-headed leader, has been barely briefed on the workings of the nuclear football and asks the aide carrying the briefcase to run down the responses. His three-word summary of the retaliation options — “rare, medium and well-done” — conjures imagery we’d prefer not to hear outside of a steakhouse.
Military advisors believe he has to choose one, otherwise America would look weak. The president isn’t fully convinced, but he doesn’t have nearly enough time to mull the alternatives. That ticking-clock impasse creates a tension that fuels the final minutes of the film.
Bigelow making a movie in which most of the story takes place in rooms full of people talking would seem like a misuse of the talents of one of our great action directors. It’s not. “A House of Dynamite” is a tightly wound dynamo, elevated by her production team, notably cinematographer Barry Ackroyd’s handheld camera work and the precisely paced editing of Kirk Baxter. Volker Bertelmann’s ominous score ramps up the feeling of suffocation.
Noah Oppenheim’s screenplay often doubles back so we hear the same lines from different perspectives, adding to our understanding and deepening our unease. He layers in some details about the primary characters’ personal lives, though the moments, usually taking place via phone calls to loved ones, are hurried so as not to draw the focus away from the ticking clock.
Perhaps the most interesting decision Oppenheim makes is giving all the key players a measure of competence. There are no buffoons here, no grandstanders. The choice puts the focus on the weaponry, implying that it doesn’t matter who’s in charge when one of these missiles (and again, there are far too many of them) is launched. But it also lends the movie an anachronistic feel. “A House of Dynamite” is set in the present, but the functional government depicted within it feels like a thing of the distant past. When you think of it that way, it makes the movie even more terrifying.
“At the end of the Cold War, global power reached the consensus that the world would be better off with fewer nuclear weapons,” the film notes in text on screen in its opening moments. Dramatic pause. “That era is now over.”
Can a movie jump-start a new era — or at least a conversation? “A House of Dynamite” would like to think such a thing is still possible. And to believe differently would be demoralizing.
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