It’s said that the Doomsday Clock has stood at just a few minutes to midnight’ for a long time, philosophers and pundits alike noting that, if anything, the midnight hour and tipping point to oblivion is closer than ever before. For a long time, the idea of nuclear Armageddon was at the forefront of people’s minds and even if, in modern years, the idea of pandemics, AI and other dubious developments have jostled for prominence. However, the idea that we are just one reckless act of aggression or even a rogue blip on a screen away from an atomic ground zero has never been as far away as one would like.
It’s that ever-present tension that Kathryn Bigelow explores in her latest film, A House of Dynamite which arrives on Netflix this weekend.
Bigelow’s films, few and further between than many of her peers – but usually more worth waiting for – often go for realism, or at least centring a narrative around an extreme but believable situation and letting the drama naturally build around it. Prime examples are the award-winning The Hurt Locker, for which I interviewed her in the before times of 2008, and 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty… the former looking at the tensions and realities of being a bomb-disposal soldier in Afghanistan whose considered and split-second decisions can be literally of life-and-death stakes for himself and others and the latter centred on the unit sent to take down Osama Bin Laden. For A House of Dynamite, the numerous IEDs of The Hurt Locker are replaced by a singular ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) that is heading towards America but, if real, could wipe out millions of people in a major city. Bigelow gives us a variety of perspectives, from the solitary bases that first dictate the missile through to those charged with verifying the situation, to those whose positions mean they give strategic advice, to the limousine where all that information is funneled to a President who never realistically expected to grapple with such decisions.
Bigelow directs with the quiet, human intensity that has become her hallmark. It’s about intelligent but normal people who are trained for the hopefully improbable being faced with the nightmare of the unthinkable and what subsequently works and what doesn’t. It’s not perfect… but its brief cinematic release ahead of the Netflix launch secures its possibility of mainstream film nominations and given previous form, one should not bet against the might of Bigelow’s aim and arsenal……
Background photographs place us firmly in modern times (there’s an image of the famous Situation Room in the aftermath of the killing of Bin Laden and we glimpse a photo depicting a cabinet meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy) even if the ‘present’ is an alternative one. There are some conveniences in the plot: a technical oversight means that no-one is quite sure from where the ICBM was launched which leads to a cascade of questions of ‘who launched it?‘ that would likely be known in such a circumstance. Though different in several important ways, the closest film that this reminds me of is Failsafe (made with Henry Fonda in 1964 and recreated as a live-broadcast with George Clooney in 2000) in which a US warplane, carrying a nuclear warhead is instructed to bomb the USSR and people on the ground must find out why it’s happened and decide what to do next). Your enjoyment of A House of Dynamite will likely be affected by how you go into the film and what you’re expecting. If you expect a whizz-bang, high-octane approach then you’re likely to find proceedings slow. Here the tensions build not with the outright action of kinetic mainstream cinema but with the amount of desperate walking and talking that would give Aaron Sorkin palpitations. It’s people at all levels of decision-making slowly realising that their normal day is anything but and that every action or inaction could literally be historical or the end of history itself.
Many of the characters are operating as blindly as we are, limited in what we know of the actual threat and its possible outcome. A failed early attempt to bring down the missile doesn’t employ vast post-production effects of explosions but is heard in relayed by audio-messages and big-screen infographics that, disturbingly look higher-resolution but no more complex or personal than the days of War Games though that’s intentional and keeps us wanting more.
However well-realised- this is a work of entertainment fiction (not as wish-fulfilling as The West Wing‘s ensemble of characters, but still devoid of any obvious villains and definitely populated by people trying to do the right thing). With its message that massive decisions are often made in minutes and seconds, relying on the mixture of calm, chaos and consideration of key people, it’s somewhat unnerving to think about real-life counterparts and situations at this time. Yet whatever your political views, this is a story that feels as quietly important today as Cold War tales were decades ago, largely because it concentrates on the realities of a domestic response rather than any changing exterior threat. All at once, it feels wholly contemporary, yet spiritually-removed from the tone of the current Trumpian administration. Yes, people will argue that the reliable Idris Elba (recently seen portraying the British Prime Minister in the far more lightweight Heads of State) and here far more serious as the unnamed President, has a distinct Barrak Obama vibe (with Renee Elise Goldsberry’s First Lady – away in Africa – also feeling a lot like Michelle Obama) and they are certainly sympathetic keystone characters in the maelstrom but it’s more the realisation that the real-life version of Jared Harris (playing Reid Baker, the Secretary of Defense) would be Pete Hegseth that will likely keep you in just as cold a sweat.
The ensemble cast are great. Rebecca Ferguson as Captain Olivia Walker is always good as a normal person trying to keep calm and commanding when thrown into extreme circumstances and for the first third of the film she anchors proceedings as she oversees the hub of activity as Captain Olivis Walker, the Senior Duty Officer in the White House Situation Room. Several generals are non-specific: Tracy Letts is a coldly pragmatic (but not unreasonably so) as General Anthony Brady and Jason Clark is the more cautious General Mark Miller; The Night Agent‘s Gabriel Basso is Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington, a lowly co-ordinator thrust into the decision-making mix when his boss is unavailable; Moses Ingram plays Cathy Roger, a senior FEMA official who is plucked out of her offices as a ‘designated survivor/advisor’ much to her own consternation and those of her colleagues left behind); Greta Lee is Ana Park an historian and academic who must offer her own insights as an ‘expert’ into motivations and the likes of Anthony Ramos as Major Daniel Gonzalez and Jonah Hauer-King as Lieutenant Commander Robert Reeves are separate parts of the front-line forces who must confront the problems more directly. The Last of Us‘ Kaitlyn Dever also turns up as Baker’s daughter, whom he must decide whether to warn or not. We meet many of these characters in passing and wish we might know their wider stories, but A House of Dynamite acknowledges that the so-called Apocalypse Clock is closing in on midnight and diligently keeps those hands moving onwards.
There are frustrations here. The trailer honestly gave us an idea of what to expect on a tension-level, but the eventual pacing – taut though it is subject-wise – does not always work perfectly. With the Rashomon-structure and two-hours of running time, you become thoroughly invested in the people thrust centre-stage only for the next part to turn back the clock at the decisive moment to see a different perspective in wholly different places with only some audio cross-cutting to keep us clear as to when things are happening in relation to things we’ve already seen… and (tv-screens and monitors excepted) only a handful of people involved in more than one segment. We move from Alaska to Africa, from Washington DC to Chicago and while that gives greater scope to a story that’s often filmed up-close-and-personal with the actors, it ironically asks the audience to not become too attached to the many cogs in the wheel as they turn away from each other. Some of the beats are a little too on-the-nose… a toy dinosaur (signifying we might go the way of the T-Rex and friends?) is shown being gripped by one character with all the subtlety of other movies’ cuddly toy in airplane wreckage and the Commander-in-Chief being a basketball fan and then being whisked away from a sporting event into a crisis seems cinematically tropey if still entirely within protocol.
Noah Oppenheim, most recently the producer on Netflix‘s Zero Day and currently the president of NBC News, gives us a strong, precise, no-nonsense script and Bigelow directs with the quiet, human intensity that has become her hallmark. It’s about intelligent but normal people who are trained for the hopefully improbable being faced with the nightmare of the unthinkable and what subsequently works and what doesn’t. It’s not perfect and some of the criticisms are valid – its structure and climax are going to be divisive for a film in which you invest nearly two hours (and would likely sit through something longer to explore and fully resolve them) and it’s not clear whether it will have the cultural impact of her previous work (though it should start just as many important conversations), but its brief cinematic release ahead of the Netflix launch secures its possibility of mainstream film nominations and given previous form, one should not bet against the might of Bigelow’s aim and arsenal…
https://www.imdb.com/video/vi3204958233/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
- Story10
- Acting10
- Direction10
- Pacing9
- Production Design / VFX9
