Casual Friday
By Gavin Smith
A House of Dynamite
Dir. Kathryn Bigelow, U.S., Netflix
Remember the good old days of Mutually Assured Destruction? Well, time, technology, and unstable geopolitics have marched nuclear brinksmanship way past Nixon-era detente. In Kathryn Bigelow’s riveting new thriller, Chicago is “gone.” Not once, not twice but three times in the film’s ingenious triptych, which replays the same events from a different vantage point and each time concludes one second before a nuclear strike incinerates the Windy City. For the agonized onlookers in their control rooms, staring helplessly at their screens as the clock counts down to zero, it’s a fait accompli with 18 minutes to go. This is not a spoiler—except for the inhabitants of Chicago and environs. Kiss the Second City goodbye.
Justly acclaimed for her nonpareil handling of dynamic, kinetic action, Bigelow has now stepped up from crime and mayhem in the streets and war in foreign lands to enter the ultimate arena of high-stakes conflict. The premise of A House of Dynamite is guttingly simple. A single unattributed missile launched somewhere in “the Pacific theater” is on its way to Chicago on a “flat suborbital inclination” (old-school ICBMs and MIRVs go up into space and then descend to target). The foreign power behind this one-off attack remains speculative thanks to a blinded surveillance satellite—was it Russia, China, or, most plausibly, North Korea? A U.S. missile defense battalion in Alaska launches two ground-based interceptors—one fails, the other misses. And—oh, it’s game over. Seriously? “There is no Plan B,” as one character puts it. With less than 20 minutes to go, astoundingly, nothing stands between death from above at 6 km per second and 10 million–plus Americans.
Meanwhile, the designated survivors of a potential nuclear war have already been escorted by the Secret Service to the bunker deep beneath the White House, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineering is on standby to dig them out when/if the dust settles, and a “dead list” is mustered of the names and social security numbers of the White House staffers who didn’t make the cut. Bigelow ends the film with a soaring high-angle view of buses and queues inching their way into Raven Rock, a giant underground complex for the select few thousand personnel who are supposed to survive the unimaginable and then emerge to try to do the impossible. It’s probably the bleakest conclusion of any movie this century to date.
Essentially a procedural, A House of Dynamite poses fresh challenges to Bigelow. Where her forte, from Near Dark to Detroit via Zero Dark Thirty, has been the high-impact action film, A House of Dynamite calls for a distinct change of approach. Specifically, a drastic expansion in dramatis personae, a strict tightening of focus to a half-dozen crowded interior locations, and the almost total elimination of the physical action that’s been her trademark—aside from brief scenes of a Presidential Basketball Camp arena meet-and-greet, an aide’s hectic FaceTime dash from the D.C. streets to the White House and a major character’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it suicide from the Pentagon’s rooftop.
To contain this vast ensemble of moving parts, Bigelow and cowriter Noah Oppenheim, a former NBC News president, opt for a bold structural gambit that makes the film buzz—it’s broken down into three overlaid sections, covering the same timeline and action from disparate, occasionally interlocking perspectives. Each section is frontloaded with brief glimpses of the personal lives and Casual-Friday-at-the-office small talk of its protagonists, before changing up to focus on confident, competent professionals contending with an emerging threat, and then pivoting upon confirmation of the GBIs’ “negative impact,” to the mounting panic and distraught powerlessness of DEFCON 1 as the crisis reaches its crescendo.
The three sections create a whirlwind of perspectives, moving steadily up the chain of command. The first section begins with characters on the frontline of defense: the commander of a desolate missile defense base in Alaska (Anthony Ramos) and the White House Situation Room head (Rebecca Ferguson) coordinating the effort to intercept the missile. The second discards these characters altogether to follow more senior figures scrambling to identify the source of the attack and formulate a response—a Deputy National Security Advisor (Gabriel Basso) in the White House bunker communicating with Russia in an effort to avert escalation and a General (Tracy Letts) in the Battle Deck of Strategic Command. (This section also surreally ropes in a North Korean expert, played by Greta Lee, for urgent advice while visiting a Battle of Gettysburg reenactment.) The final section redirects its attention to the top of the government—the Defense Secretary (Jared Harris) at the Pentagon and the (unnamed) President (Idris Elba), codenamed “Icon,” off in Pennsylvania for a public engagement and soon bundled into a helicopter. Interspersed are scenes aboard a U.S. nuclear submarine and a B-2 Stealth bomber readying for action and awaiting orders, succinct glimpses of the war machine gearing up.
Driven by Barry Ackroyd’s sustained handheld camerawork and Kirk Baxter’s rapid-fire cutting, Bigelow creates a dizzying concatenation of human voices and crosstalk—something that’s completely new for her. Her approach also yields a strikingly abstract quality. Rather than depicting the central crisis as an unfolding spectacle, Bigelow’s clock-ticking emphasis is on second-to-second verbal exchanges, updates and anguished debates in crowded control rooms and over zoom calls, and the giant screens monitoring the implacable real-time advancement of doomsday. The big boards offer purely graphic displays that track the suborbital trajectories of the inbound object and the interceptors deployed to arrest its progress, distance to target, and time to impact. Everything that’s happening is being viewed at one remove but remains no less real. Further accentuating the sense of abstraction is the absence of the President, only a disembodied voice heard patchily over the phone, before at last emerging at the center of the final part to become the eye of the hurricane.
Elba does sterling work here as a man out of his depth and gasping for breath, faced with the most daunting requirement of his office—to make a decision nobody on Earth has ever had to make before. Here, as throughout, Bigelow ensures that the film retains a human scale amidst an inhuman reality, from the President’s phone call to the First Lady in Africa to the calls the Major and the Defense Secretary make to loved ones in Chicago to the Situation Room’s captain calling her husband and telling him to drive west with their daughter, keep going and avoid cities.
A House of Dynamite culminates in a terrible choice: “Surrender or suicide,” as the Deputy National Security Advisor frames it. Who to strike back at and how hard? Turns out “the football” is a briefcase containing a thick, three-ring binder in the custody of a creepy Navy Lt. Commander (Spencer House), a retaliatory strategy advisor dressed in all-whites—an Angel of Death calmly presenting the President’s options like a waiter with a menu, offering “rare, medium, or well-done.” Preparing a counterstrike, POTUS reads the launch codes over the phone from his helicopter. Will he take the final step and give the order? We’ll never know. And it doesn’t matter. Where we as a civilization are in 2025 is the whole point of the film. Whatever the President decides is inconceivable—unless you buy the STRATCOM General’s realpolitik: “We’ve already lost one American city today… I’d accept the loss of 10 million Americans if it stopped there.” (In this conception of how to avert nuclear Armageddon, Bigelow’s film is not far from Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe. The difference is that the pace of events is so much more rapid.) A House of Dynamite is the very definition of suspense: a combination of fear and hope—fear that something bad will happen, and hope that it won’t. It doesn’t always work out the way you’d like it to.