Choose Your Own Apocalypse
My thoughts on A House of Dynamite
A House of Dynamite is a film that undeniably works in terms of broad strokes—it is well-crafted, contains a number of effective performances and manages to juggle a large number of locations, characters and complex details in a relatively clean and efficient manner—but proves to be lacking in the kind of detail and innovative approach that might have made it into the kind of powerhouse drama that it is clearly aspiring to be. If it had come from most ordinary directors working today, I suppose that it might have been easy enough to forgive or at least overlook those flaws in order to focus on the aforementioned good stuff. However, this is the newest film from the great Kathryn Bigelow—her first narrative feature in eight years—who has demonstrated her undeniable gifts as a filmmaker in such projects as Near Dark, Strange Days, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty and, fairly or not, when I go into a new film of hers, I expect to see something bold, unique and audacious because I know that she is more than capable of delivering in that department. Here, she has delivered a film that works on all the expected technical levels but doesn’t really do much beyond that to make it into anything particularly memorable.
The premise of the film is that one fine day, just after everyone has settled in for what appears to be a normal day, the corridors of power in Washington D.C. are rocked by the detection of a nuclear missile that is determined to be headed straight for Chicago, where it is tracked to detonate in approximately 18 minutes. At first, it is assumed that this is nothing more than a glitch—there is nothing in current world tensions that would suggest such a ramp-up in aggression—but not only does it prove to be very real, no one has any idea of where it came from—could it be from a country like North Korea or Russia or is it possible that a rogue element wants people to think that it came from them? As the timer gets closer to zero and efforts to shoot the missile done fail, a number of analysts, military people and civilian advisers work the problem to try to figure out if there is still a way of stopping the missile and, if there isn’t, decide on what the response should be—retaliate and risk starting World War III or do nothing and essentially sacrifice the greatest city in the world for nothing.
The big structural gambit here is that the film essentially presents the same ticking-clock scenario in total three different times in a row, each one presenting differing perspectives of the unfolding crisis from the numerous departments involved as they try to avert disaster. In one, for example, the focus is on the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, where a group of military and civilian personnel led by analyst Capt. Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) try to get a handle on the situation even as a number of presumably fail-safe protective options prove to be otherwise. In another, the emphasis is on military matters as chief Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts) presses for an immediate preemptive counter-strike despite not knowing for certain who is responsible. In the last, the film shifts over to the unseen-to-that-point U.S. President (Idris Elba), who is out shooting hoops with Angel Reese and some school kids when everything starts and finds himself trying to gather the information required to make a decision that will affect the lives of countless millions while in transit.
On the surface, A House of Dynamite is a reasonably effective thriller about the possibility of nuclear annihilation, one that leans more towards the sober-minded approach favored by Sidney Lumet in Fail-Safe than the black comedy take favored by Stanley Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove. In offering up the three different perspectives of the event unfolding, Bigelow hits viewers with a barrage of information and details, not to mention half-heard things that will be more fully revealed later on, but delivers it all in a clean and efficient manner that manages to convey things to viewers without bogging things down with clumsy exposition or explanations of exactly what is happening. She also does a fairly impressive job of keeping the tension going even after the narrative structure is fully revealed. The film also makes the smart call to make all of the characters smart and competent at their jobs as they try, in their own ways, to find a solution to the problem (even the general pushing for full retaliation is presented in rational non-cartoonish terms) in order to underscore its basic theme—even with the most dedicated and rational-minded people imaginable running the show, all it takes is a couple of unexpected stumbles to potentially destroy everything.
And yet, for all of the intensity on display as it unfolds, little of A House of Dynamite sticks with you afterwards—not in the way that a Kathryn Bigelow film typically does and certainly not in the way that Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe have managed to do after all these years—and the stuff that does cling on in your mind are the bits that are memorable in all the wrong ways. The screenplay by Noah Oppenheim is intriguing for a bit but once the structure is revealed, it tries to keep things from getting repetitive by adding in bits of human interest—it turns out that the Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris) has an estranged daughter (Kaitlyn Denver) living in Chicago—and ham-fisted ironies like having an analyst (Greta Lee) offering up projected estimates of the potential loss of life while a reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg is blasting away in the background. These bits are obviously meant to humanize the characters but they are almost entirely mistakes (don’t get me started on the bit where the President, who needs to make an imminent decision, takes a time out to call his wife who is away on safari in Africa) that end up clashing with the atmosphere of tense professionalism that Bigelow is trying to maintain.
A House of Dynamite has another key problem working against it, thought this one is not entirely the fault of the film itself, per se. As I mentioned earlier, the conceit of the movie is that all the characters involved with trying to break down and solve the problem of the oncoming missile are all presented as smart, capable and fairly reasonable in nature, the better to highlight the notion that if throughly competent people in reasonable times are incapable of steering us away from a nuclear apocalypse the moment that something goes wrong, perhaps continuing to stockpile such weapons is ultimately more trouble than it is worth. The problem, of course, is that these are not reasonable times and the people currently in charge are anything but competent—even the overtly satirical Dr. Strangelove feels restrained and subdued in comparison to what we are experiencing these days—and that knowledge casts a pall on the proceedings from which the film can never quite remember. You know times are dire when you are watching a movie positing our potential imminent nuclear destruction and none of it is nearly as ghastly as what is going on outside of the theater.
Would A House of Dynamite have worked better if it had come out at a different point in time? Maybe a little, I suppose, but regardless of when it came out, one would still have to contend with the fact that it takes a situation that should theoretically be gripping enough on its own and loads it down with too many melodramatic elements rather than trusting its initial premise. As I said, Bigelow delivers it with a lot of style but is hobbled by a screenplay that plays more like a writing exercise than a compelling story—watching it is like observing someone going through the old Kobayashi Maru training program three times in a row in order to experience as many of the pre-programmed obstacles for themselves as possible—and which ultimately doesn’t have much to say about its subject, or much of anything else, by the time it is all over.