A scramble begins to decide on the appropriate response when a mysterious missile is launched against the US.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow
Starring: Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Jason Clarke, Greta Lee
The 1980s brought the threat of nuclear annihilation back to popular culture in a way not seen since the 1950s. With tensions rising between the US and USSR, it felt like the little hand on the Doomsday clock was edging all too close to midnight. This was reflected in a slew of TV movies (Threads, Special Bulletin, Countdown to Looking Glass) and mini series (The Day After, which Reagan claimed changed his view on nuclear proliferation) that imagined how the world might react to a nuclear strike. Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite is a throwback to those movies, but it differs in one specific way. While its '80s predecessors were set over weeks or days in the lead up to a nuclear strike, Bigelow's film plays out over a mere 18 minutes from launch to impact.
A House of Dynamite has a running time of 112 minutes, so if you crunch the numbers you'll see that Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim (whose surname is two letters short of some nominative determinism) have another 94 minutes to fill. So what's the deal here?
Bigelow's film plays out those 18 minutes three times from three different perspectives, and none of them play out in real time. First up we're taken into the bowels of the White House where Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) heads a team who look out for threats against the US. When she's alerted to the launch of a nuclear missile from an unidentified location in the Pacific, Walker remains cool as a warhead-shaped cucumber. As she notes, it's the third such launch in recent weeks. It soon becomes clear however that this is not a test. The missile is headed to the continental US, likely targeting a major MidWest city.
When the scenario plays out to its conclusion we rewind to the beginning of those fraught 18 minutes and now view the controlled chaos from inside a military facility headed by General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts). The final replay shows us how the President (Idris Elba) reacts to the situation, having been whisked away from a photo op at a basketball event.
The first act of A House of Dynamite is a riveting short movie. The second act is a less compelling version of the same events, and the final act is barely engaging. Bigelow and Oppenheim's storytelling structure leads to considerable diminishing returns. It faces the same key problem as all of those Groundhog Day clones that have recently become popular, that of how to keep repeating the same scenario without the audience growing tired of repetition. But it fails to clear this obstacle, as there simply isn't enough variation between the three distinct chapters. The second chapter spends much of its time literally repeating dialogue we've already heard, just from the other side of a video call.
We're left to wonder how much more engaging this might have been if the three chapters had been intercut to stretch the scenario to fill the run time. Bigelow seems to think we're too cynical to still fall for the old five minute countdown that lasts for 30 minutes in a James Bond movie, but it's only a few years ago that audiences bought the idea that Vin Diesel could spend 40 minutes driving at top speed down an airport runway.
As everyone here is a stoic professional committed to the task at hand, there's not much room for distinctive characterisation, so these people aren't very interesting as individuals. That's fine for the first chapter, as it's the scenario we're interested in more so than the people involved. But when we know exactly how all of this plays out the scenario no longer has the same impact - we need to see how this is affecting human beings.
Ironically, Elba's President feels more human in the first two chapters, when we only hear his voice as he listens and responds to experts. It's a fantastic vocal performance, with Elba conveying the unimaginable stress he suddenly finds himself under. But once Elba appears on screen the illusion is shattered somewhat. He stops being a believable world leader and immediately becomes just another movie star in the role of the American President.
The first chapter mines so much drama and tension from Ferguson's Walker interacting with politicians and military figures via screens, that you might wonder if this might have worked better had Bigelow opted to ape the "screenlife" format made popular by producer Timur Bekmambetov (Unfriended, Searching, Missing et al). After all, this is essentially a film of talking heads, which makes you wonder why one of our finest action filmmakers is making stuff like this while major blockbusters are entrusted to mumblecore directors. Bigelow can't help but bring a Hollywood cheesiness to this scenario, with tacky cutaways to discarded teddy bears and a ridiculously on-the-nose sequence where an expert on North Korea (Greta Lee) receives a phone call while watching a re-enactment of the Battle of Gettysburg.
Like the '70s disaster movies to which it owes a debt, A House of Dynamite's greatest appeal lies in its star-studded cast. It's undeniably fun to watch so many established stars and "that guy" character actors constantly popping up on screen. But the film also suffers from being overstuffed with its ensemble. There are several characters who are introduced in a manner that leads us to assume they're set to play some major role in the proceedings, only to disappear as though the script forgot they had been introduced. I'm thinking chiefly of Willa Fitzgerald's White House secretary and Moses Ingram's FEMA official, both of whom get the sort of introduction usually afforded to the hero of a Roland Emmerich blockbuster, only to have no impact on the subsequent story.
For its first act, A House of Dynamite is a gripping and scary reminder of how the nuclear threat refuses to go away. But by the end of the film that threat feels as tangible as the overblown apocalyptic dangers of the aforementioned Emmerich's line of big budget schlock. Like the blast radius of a nuke, as Bigelow's drama expands its impact lessens.
A House of Dynamite is in UK/ROI cinemas now and on Netflix from October 24th.
