DAN WEBSTER:
Movies devoted to themes of imminent nuclear war used to be a common occurrence. Reminiscent of such 1960s-era offerings as Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove, we now have the theatrical release, soon to be streaming on Netflix, called A House of Dynamite.
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow and based on an original script by screenwriter/producer Noah Oppenheim, A House of Dynamite envisions what might happen if a single intercontinental ballistic missile were to be shot at the United States. Bigelow and Oppenheim take us inside the various government departments and show us how such a crisis might be handled—or, depending on how you view what they say and do, perhaps mishandled.
Bigelow’s movie opens at a remote military installation in Alaska where a team of specialists, commanded by a Major Gonzalez (played by Anthony Ramos), is tasked with monitoring potential threats to the United States. They become aware of such a threat when they begin tracking a missile, origin unknown, that appears headed somewhere toward the U.S. Midwest.
When they transmit the information to a special operations center in the White House, a Capt. Walker (played by Rebecca Ferguson) marshals her department into action. Pretty soon everyone from the Secretary of Defense (played by Jared Harris) to the president (played by Idris Elba) and several advisors—including a hard-nosed general (played by Tracy Letts)—gets connected via a video call… and the arguments about what to do commence.
All the while, a clock counts down the estimated 18 minutes before the missile is supposed to land on what, finally, has been determined to be Chicago, threatening to exterminate its near-10-million residents.
This first section of Bigelow’s movie is the most effective, with the professional obligations of various characters gradually becoming enmeshed with their personal concerns. If this is the real thing, a possibility that minute-by-minute becomes ever more apparent, how will they—and, to some more important, their loved ones—manage to survive?
The debate over what to do resembles one of those philosophical morality tests where you’re forced to choose between the least worst of two bad options. Letts’ general wants to strike back, even though such an action will clearly result in a nuclear Armageddon, while a young national security advisor (played by Gabriel Basso) argues for restraint.
All of this recalls an era in which children were trained to climb under their school desks in case of such an attack—an era that, at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall, has tended to fade into our collective consciousness. But as she has shown in the past, in films as diverse as Near Dark and Point Break to The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow portrays this kind of rat-a-tat-tat action with quick cuts and military precision that, buoyed by a strong cast, can ably remind us of the tenuous nature of a nuclear-armed world.
Yet just as Oppenheim’s script reaches a climax, a little less than an hour in, the movie shifts gears. Suddenly, we’re back at the beginning and we go through the whole story again, only now we experience it through characters who played only minor roles the first time around. Then the movie repeats the gimmick, this time keying on the characters played by Harris and Elba.
And with each succeeding chapter, three in all, the drama—and attendant intensity—despite the efforts of all involved, slowly abates. Even worse, Oppenheim declines to come up with an actual ending, which Bigelow chooses to portray by… well, revealing that would provide one too many spoilers.
What’s clear is that A House of Dynamite plays on a theme of yet another movie about potential nuclear disaster. In 1983’s War Games, an artificial intelligence called Joshua has been programmed to mistake, yes, a mere game for what is an actual impending war. Yet it recognizes the threat just in time.
In the world we live in now, filled as it is with tones of nationalistic fervor, one can only hope that such an attitude, even if it were to emanate from AI, would be enough to counter any similar real-life scenario. As the AI Joshua proclaims, “A strange game, the only winning move is not to play.”
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for spokesman.com.