In the early 1980s, during what must grimly be acknowledged as the “golden age” of the nuclear-war drama, the most effective and compelling movies on the subject confined themselves to the effects of such a war on ordinary people. The feature film Testament, the American TV movie The Day After, and the BBC production Threads each perceived a nuclear engagement through the prism of citizens, not decision-makers.
By contrast, in Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, there is scarcely a civilian in sight, unless you count the occasional legacy media reporter or the spouses or offspring of assorted civil servants. Bigelow populates her film with bureaucrats, technocrats, military personnel, elected officials, and public servants of one stripe or another. The film, released in theaters last week and slated to premiere on Netflix on Oct. 24, deposits us in the White House Situation Room and other citadels of power. This makes the movie at once more distant — because it is harder for average moviegoers to relate to someone on the government payroll — and far more frightening than its antecedents. We could grasp why no one among the farmers, college students, and doctors depicted in The Day After would ever be equal to the aftermath of a nuclear war. But it is mind-numbingly scary to suppose that the people paid to guard against America’s destruction are as ill-equipped to reckon with a surprise nuclear attack as they are in A House of Dynamite. In other words, it’s deeply and worrisomely plausible.
Bigelow is the director of films such as Near Dark, The Hurt Locker, and Zero Dark Thirty. Long ago, she was the spouse of James Cameron, and their track records, judged against each other, amply demonstrate that she is the more gifted and eclectic filmmaker. None of her past films equals, in intensity or conviction, A House of Dynamite. While her ex-husband attends to the struggles of the Blue Man Group in Avatar and its many unwanted sequels, Bigelow addresses, with compelling urgency, a real-world scenario that, however improbable or inconceivable, could unfold at any time.
Noah Oppenheim’s lean, merciless screenplay covers a single 24-hour period. Part of the effectiveness of the compressed time period is that no one we meet can possibly fathom how the day might end. Soldiers stationed at Fort Greely in Alaska busy themselves with small talk and dirty their desks with potato chips. In Washington, Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) stays up late to watch over her little boy, who has been fighting off a 102-degree fever. Her husband expresses surprise that she will wear relaxed attire to the White House, where she works in the Situation Room, but she reminds him that it’s casual Friday. We take note of this when we hear it: It will be a Friday when the world comes to a crossroads. We take note, too, of the crisp images of those great monuments in the nation’s capital, and the innocuous greeting that appears on a crosstown bus: “Have a nice day.”
Bigelow builds genuine tension through the presentation of these indifferent details, including Walker ordering breakfast from the White House commissary, a FEMA official (Moses Ingram) scrolling housing listings on company time, and the itinerary of events laid out for the president that day (an appearance at a girls’ basketball camp, a visit from the Irish ambassador). The tension is, in a perverse sense, relieved when we become aware of the nature and source of the threat: an intercontinental ballistic missile that appears to originate from North Korea and is careening toward Chicago.
Denial reigns supreme, even, or especially, in the Situation Room. “Give me a shout-out if the world is going to end,” someone says. The Swedish actress Ferguson gives Captain Walker plenty of composure and authority, but we don’t quite believe her when she initially tries to explain away or minimize the launch. There is a fine line between prudence and wishful thinking. Quickly, other players become roped into the disaster, including Defense Secretary Reid Baker (Jared Harris) and National Security Agency official Ana Park (Greta Lee), but they are just as incredulous. We are struck by how diffuse the various decision-makers are; many are clustered in the Situation Room, while others are in their offices or even, in the case of deputy national security adviser Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso), en route to the office on foot. The prospect of officials meeting about an imminent strike on the homeland over what looks to be essentially a Zoom call is not especially reassuring, though it may prove valuable since it means the nation’s VIPs are not, at least, in a single vulnerable location.
Much hope is placed in attempts to disrupt the ICBM — to hit a bullet with a bullet, as one character explains — but even before the success rate of such an effort is explained, we sense it will fail. Global chaos, referred to but largely unseen, erupts as the missile wends its way to the American Midwest: The Chinese try to reach the Americans, and, at a more critical juncture, a Russian official seeks reassurance that the U.S. will not use the attack as a pretext to take down his nation. Part of the art of the film is that each competing agenda is presented credibly, even respectfully. Yes, we imagine, diplomacy and goodwill would be in short supply in the 20 minutes that would precede the cataclysm imagined in the movie.
The film moves along at a clip, but it often feels as though the characters are operating in slow motion. A CNN reporter says, before the real picture has become clear to her: “The senator just got up and left in the middle of that hearing” — as though she was expecting business as usual. We are reminded that a million ordinary things would suddenly cease in the event of a genuine national emergency. Distressingly, numerous characters whom we have gotten to know, including Jason Clarke’s Admiral Mark Miller, are forcibly removed to secure locations. Soon, Chicago becomes a lost cause — General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts, unusually excellent) refers to the city in the past tense even before it presumably is — and the film narrows its concerns to what happens next. Should the president assume that the presumed North Korean attack is a one-off and limit or delay his response, or should he infer that the attack is merely an opening salvo, possibly involving other nations, that can only be blunted by a full-throttle response?
As played by Idris Elba, the president is bewildered by the weight of his choice, though he expresses a bizarre sort of hope when he wonders whether the American people would stand for a nonresponse to the loss of Chicago — hopeful because it assumes there will be an American people who still remain by the end of the day. The first lady (Renee Elise Goldsberry) is on some sort of environmental trip in Africa, and the usually superficial optics of such travel acquire a hopeful patina when we consider that the African continent might just be spared.
ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE
Oppenheimer has structured the film like Stanley Kubrick’s classic crime thriller The Killing: The tracking of the missile is viewed from various vantage points, including that of General Brady, at the United States Strategic Command, and, finally, from the president, who confronts his options while riding in the back of the presidential car (“the Beast”) and then aboard Marine One. Because we are now familiar with what will happen — the missile will reach its target — these alternate views are less suspenseful than agonizing. The high-level officials, parked behind an endless array of monitors, display a striking degree of helplessness. Bigelow often operates on the assumption that the shakier the camerawork, the more believable the action. In this case, the stylistic gambit pays off.
What should our leaders do in the events imagined in the film? General Brody, who argues for a maximalist response, seems most attuned to reality and to the depths of evil in America’s adversaries; Baerington, the deputy national security adviser, pitches moderation, which will either halt or accelerate world-annihilating destruction. The only sure thing is that an American government that has reached this apocalyptic crossroads has failed to project might and deterrence. This is a despairing film that does us the favor of not telling us which choice the president makes — either way, it would almost surely be too much to bear.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
