Katheryn Bigelow’s latest is an exploration of when you do everything right and everything still goes wrong.
I was born in 1984. This means all of my active memories, especially of anything in a sociopolitical sense, were after the Cold War. It was after America’s pre-occupation and paranoia over nuclear war. I grew up in the glow of the 1990s, “the end of history” where we had defeated the Soviets and all agreed it was time to turn the temperature on our nuclear arms race. I was a teenager when the war on terrorism began, my first truly politically activated moment, and entered the work force in the early years of Obama. For the past decade I have seen the degradation of our national politics and governance by an increasingly volatile style of governmental incompetence headed by an openly corrupt President. This has been the American public life I have known.
Which is all a bit of a personal pre-amble to acknowledge, I don’t think about nuclear war all that often. But I know for the generations before me, it remains a real spectre of their formative years. That brief period when we believed that the era of mutually assured destruction was coming to an end has slowly eroded over time however. Just this year, military actions by the US government to deter a perceived enemy from reaching nuclear capability drew a line under just how much of a concern this might actually be. The fact that there is enough armament to end life as we know on this planet doesn’t keep me up at night, but perhaps it should. Scratch that, it definitely should.
That is the heart of House of Dynamite, the newest film from Katheryn Bigelow. Bigelow made history for being the first woman to ever win an Academy Award for best director with her harrowing portrayal of the Iraq War, The Hurt Locker. She also made headlines with Zero Dark Thirty, a film critics saw as an apologia for the CIA’s use of torture in the search for Osama Bin Laden. Her newest film in over a decade (since the relentlessly punishing Detroit) offers a third entry into ruminations on war and geopolitics. What if someone blew it all up?
The central event of House of Dynamite is simple and sharp: to the surprise of the United States, an unknown source fires a nuclear ICBM towards the United States. The initial response from all involved is to launch into protocols, each assuring each other this will be a simple solve and that we have been prepared for this moment. But over time each of those safeguards fail, despite the best intentions and competence of those involved. The crushing weight of the coming crisis dawns on everyone over a swift 20 minutes period, from calm confidence that all shall be well to devastation that in fact it might all be over.
If it feels like this description gives away most of the plot, it’s because it almost certainly does. The most exciting part of A House of Dynamite is how it is the most structurally ambitious film in Bigelow’s career. While not precisely in “real time” (the actual ticking clock contracts quite a bit as it cross cuts across scenarios), it does make sure to emphasize that things go from bad to worse very quickly, essentially setting a clock to a catastrophic event and then watching it tick down. Then it resets the clock, quite literally, showing the exact same events from a different perspective.
The first section of the film deals with two primary locations: an Alaskan anti-missle base where Army soldiers nominally wait for nothing to happen, and the White House situation room where crises are detected and dealt with swiftly. The events next play out against the backdrop of United States Strategic Command, as well as the White House where as frazzled, out of his depth Deputy National Security Advisor attempts to navigate the best means to avoid disastrous escalation. And the final reset focuses on the President and the SecDef, those who are nominally in charge of making impossible decisions. Sprinkled throughout are portraits of other governmental agencies and military personnel, and even the press’ desire to attain any information.
All of this is anchored in Bigelow’s trademark tension, and each time it resets the clock that tension becomes a little less bearable. By the third go around, the audience dreads the events playing out again and again. There is a cut of this film to be made that shows everything unfolding side by side. But in addition to being literally a 30 minutes film in that cut, it also would give each part of the whole scenario less time to breathe. In what is largely a situation room drama, we keep punctuating with moments of human toll: glimpses of the lives of people who even within this bubble have normal lives churning on behind them. For everyone along the chain, they have simulated scenarios like this. But it becomes much more guttural once it goes from wargames to reality. The film’s insistence on showing real life, on the mundane things worth protecting such as caring for your child and falling in love, underlines just how devastating the events unfolding are.
This human element is also grounded by a true ensemble cast, where the attention shifts from person to person to reflect the full scope of the scenario. Idris Elba is the biggest name as the unnamed President, who is a bundle of nerves even before a doomsday scenario lays out before him. Rebecca Ferguson plays Captain Olivia Walker, a senior member of the Situation Room who starts with a cool facade that drops as she realizes the magnitude of what is happening. Perhaps the standout performance is Tracy Letts as General Brady, the STRATCOM military officer who is responsible for informing the President that hard decisions need to be made. All the performances meet each moment with the gravity necessary; the repetitive nature of the film’s structure means that you come back to specific conversations and scenes again and again. Thus the depth of certain moments of line delivery varies. A moment which feels incidental in one scene is given more weight and significance later on.
The script, from former head of NBC News Noah Oppenheim, delves into the dirt of what an actual response to an event like this could look like. While technical and dense by nature, it never feels impenetrable and the tension is consistently readable. There are moments when the dialogue edges into the poetic where it can bump slightly, but the conversations feel relentlessly authentic.
This is elevated by Bigelow’s shooting style, which opts for the same faux documentary style that she implemented in her other war films and less her earlier, more ecstatic style. This is a film that mostly plays out over tense phone calls and video conferences, but it also is obsessive about the actual process of these safeguards. A strangely refreshing aspect of the subtext of the film is that everyone within the chain of command in these scenes has considered this very moment with utmost seriousness. These are competent people executing the plan to perfection; when things fall apart, they are dismayed because they did everything they are meant to. It is a tragedy of competent people being routed by circumstances. In that way, and that way alone, it remains oddly more hopeful than our current political circumstances.
