The mere mention of the word ‘nuclear’ is enough to send a chill down anyone’s spine. It’s part of the vocabulary of the Apocalypse, striking enough to have its own film genre given the uniqueness of the type of destruction it signifies.
Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite is but the latest entry in the long line of nuclear disaster films that includes such classics as Failsafe, The China Syndrome, Threads, The Day After, Colossus: The Forbin Project, and Dr. Strangelove. There are a lot of heavy hitters in this category, most of which terrify most comprehensively. They essentially operate as cautionary tales, darkly speculative fictions that speak to the madness behind humanity’s capacity for self-annihilation. Question now is, does Bigelow’s tale of nuclear fear hold its own among its peers?
A House of Dynamite (a title that perfectly captures the problem of stockpiling nuclear weapons) follows a series of government agencies and their teams as they react to the launch of a nuclear missile from an unknown point of origin. It’s heading to the United States, meaning decisions have to be made quickly to have a chance at strategic retaliation should the missile not be intercepted. Incredulity settles in, then panic, and then reaction. The unthinkable starts becoming a potential outcome, testing the moral and existential limits of everyone involved.
The film’s cast is exceptional, with actors Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Greta Lee, and Anthony Ramos at the top of their games. They all do an incredible job of selling the insurmountable sense of anxiety that accompanies crisis events such as these. Ferguson and Basso in particular wear their fears on their sleeves while also maintaining their composures under immense pressure. Ramos and Lee also excel, but they’re not given enough screentime to stretch their wings.
Bigelow is a proven director, a meticulous filmmaker that knows how to create the necessary conditions to make her fiction believable. House of Dynamite is no exception. The movie is tense and it starts off with a great sense of forward momentum. The stakes rise fast, and Bigelow finds ways to feed important information at a steady pace to keep the situation from feeling stale. Characters are also given the chance to take a breath and take in the horror of the unprovoked attack and its fast-approaching implications.
And then, after the story’s firing on all cylinders and the tension is at its peak, the movie reveals its true self by cutting to black after an important scene to go back to the beginning of the story. We get to see the missile attack from another point of view, going through the same sequence of events but with a few key differences to justify the reset. Rinse, repeat.
The excitement drops off a cliff. It builds up again as the new POV colors the situation somewhat differently. But knowing another repeat is coming zaps any sense of progression or momentum. The problem lies in how little impact many of the newer revelations end up having. They feel like things that could’ve easily been included in a linear narrative to produce the same effect. While some tidbits of info unearth unexpected anxieties, none of them do much to justify the narrative structure.
A House of Dynamite stood to learn a thing or two from the classics that preceded it. Almost as a rule, those nuclear crisis movies commit to both a responsible party and an outcome. This helps their stories to address consequence and accountability. Bigelow’s take opts for ambiguity to merely comment on the situation on more general terms.
It would’ve worked if the script (written by Noah Oppenheim) found truly groundbreaking things to say within that frame. But it doesn’t. It says nothing that Sidney Lumet’s 1964 Fail Safe, for instance, hasn’t said already. And more eloquently at that. In that film, a mechanical error causes the US to deploy bombers to Moscow, forcing the Soviets to contemplate retaliation (and thus Mutually Assured Destruction). Anticommunist hardliners push for a preemptive strike now that the planes are in the air, while cooler heads argue for deescalation.
A House of Dynamite lacks the ethical, moral, and diplomatic nuances Fail Safe and the other films traffic in to get their points across. Lumet lets characters put forth their arguments to show how ugly nuclear politics can get and how it turns people into numbers. Bigelow and Oppenheim focus largely on containment and retaliation, but more as a matter of process. Discussions don’t get that much richer after each rewind either.
The movie deals with international uncertainty well and it extracts a lot of terror from it, but it’s also somewhat undercooked. If the enemy is to remain faceless, then see the situation all the way through to break new ground. As it stands, Bigelow just shows us how scary it is to be in the middle of a nuclear attack. Nothing more, nothing less.
A House of Dynamite works best as a movie for those uninitiated in nuclear fear cinema. It goes through the main points and captures a lot of what makes some of best movies in its category great. Unfortunately, its multiple POV approach adds little to the overall experience. It frustrates more than it enlightens. Repetition can work, but only if there’s good enough reason to go back to the beginning in the first place.
