Few things would surprise me less than Netflix dropping a three-hour, three-episode extended cut of Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite. It’s already episodic by design – in essence, you get to watch the US Government try to stop an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), fired from somewhere in the Pacific, before it hits Chicago, and once that fails, decide whether or not to retaliate. All that drama takes place over the course of eighteen minutes, and we follow the action in several different settings – Chyenne Mountain, FEMA headquarters, the White House Situation room, the Pentagon, a missile base in Alaska, to name a few – and aboard Marine One, where the President (Idris Elba) has to make a choice, one that might make him, to misquote Alan Moore’s Watchmen, “the most powerful man on the cinder.” If you’ve read Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario*, you’re likely already familiar with some of the key points that writer Noah Oppenheim hits here: the defense systems are practically non-existent, the fog of war makes it almost impossible to figure out a proportional response, and we’re all fucked. Continue folding your laundry.
The first time you watch this situation unfold, it’s almost unbearably tense. Please bear with me here, as the movie throws a lot of specific locations and branches of the military at you, and as a layman (with a bit of knowledge about what’s going on here), I may get some stuff wrong. The introductory segment splits time between a missile base at Fort Greely, Alaska, and a White House communications center. Our two “famous faces” are Anthony Ramos, playing the Major in charge at the base, and Rebecca Ferguson, who is the Captain in charge of comms in DC. They’re both somewhat distracted by their personal lives – Ramos is suffering through a break-up, while Ferguson’s young son is sick – but all that goes out the window when the early-warning systems go off. A missile is en route to the United States. While the Major begins prepping his crew to launch three GBIs (Ground-Based Interceptors) to try and shoot down the missile while it’s at its apex in the upper atmosphere, the Captain gathers the principals on a video call. Those include the President, the Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris), the General in charge at Cheyenne (Tracy Letts), and a deputy NSC security advisor (Gabriel Basso), among others.
At first, no one believes the warnings. It looks like a test, sounds like a test – until it very much isn’t. The Captain’s boss (Jason Clarke), the Admiral in charge of the Situation Room, is a steady hand amid the chaos, reminding the people in the comms center that this is, in fact, what they’ve spent their lives training for, and that the GBIs will likely do their job. Problem is, there aren’t a whole lot of real-world examples of a GBI actually using its kinetic energy payload to disable an ICBM mid-flight, and the likelihood of its success is, as the SecDef puts it, “a coin flip.” While that drama is unfolding, the probability that the missile will strike a major US city increases, before landing at 100 percent certainty that Chicago is the target. Ten million people will die if the GBIs don’t work. Of course, given that the film depicts a worst-case scenario, each of the three missiles fails. Cue the Major walking outside, dry-heaving in the Alaskan air, and the Captain calling her husband and son and telling them to “drive west,” away from all population centers. Meanwhile, on the call, the General advocates for a full decapitation strike on America’s enemies. At the same time, the Deputy NSC official pleads with them for more time to contact the Russians or the Chinese. It all comes down to the President’s choice, though, and, on Marine One, as he reads off the first of the Gold Codes on the small notecard he keeps tucked in his money clip to the officer (Jonah Hauer-King) holding the Nuclear Football, he begins to have second thoughts about whether or not he should order a strike, at least until those “unknown knowns” Donald Rumsfeld talked about become “known knowns.”
Right before he makes a choice, Bigelow and Oppenheim double back, taking us to the start of the morning for Basso’s NSC official and Letts’ General. You can practically hear “I Got You, Babe” as the clock resets, and we relive the nightmare J. Robert Oppenheimer dreamed about from another set of eyes, this time with a focus on the “who,” rather than the “what.” North Koreans? Russians? Chinese? Once that ends, Sonny and Cher are cued up for another cycle, this time following Elba and Harris as they go about their busy mornings (the former visited an Angel Reese basketball camp before getting whisked off to avoid comparisons to George W. Bush and My Pet Goat, the latter was at the golf course). In this segment, Bigelow focuses on the “why” and “how,” as in “Why the hell did we give one dude the sole authority to authorize the destruction of mankind?” and “How would you like your apocalypse?” Hauer-King’s nuclear center tells the President he’s got three options before the snap: “rare, medium, and extra crispy.” There’s no Patrick Mahomes collapsed-pocket scramble here, as they’re up against the Eagles’ defense, if the Eagles’ defense were a cobalt-salted nuclear weapon looking to cook the Windy City.
There’s nothing wrong with the perspective that A House of Dynamite takes – after all, since the very beginning of the Atomic Age, filmmakers like Kubrick, Lumet, Kramer, and a murderer’s row of other talents have zoomed in on the absurd conditions and protocols that have been designed to seemingly ensure mankind’s annihilation and the speed at which they would unfold in a scenario like this. It’s a fucking terrifying subject, and even if I didn’t care for Nuclear War: A Scenario as a work of non-fiction narrative storytelling, it still kept me up at night, haunted by its depiction of an entirely plausible apocalypse. The problem lies with the team responsible for communicating that perspective — the Bigelow-Oppenheim pairing doesn’t work at all. Add to that Barry Ackroyd’s cinematography, which takes the kineticism he brought to Bigelow’s prior films and the good movies he shot for Paul Greengrass (Captain Phillips, United 93) and transforms it into something that wouldn’t look out of place on an episode of The Thick of It or Veep. It’s all shaky-cams and snap-zooms in anonymous rooms lit by LED screens, unless it’s depicting the end-of-the-world Zoom call that most of the characters are participating in.
Oppenheim’s not a bad screenwriter, but his brand of research-heavy yet imaginative storytelling is best suited for empathetic drama (he wrote Jackie, beautifully realized by Pablo Lorrain into its ideal on-screen form) or, you know, news, rather than propulsive political horror. As such, he commits to a devastatingly bad idea in the structure, and he hopes that the three parts will stack, offering complementary information and context for the prior scenes. The problem is that they really don’t: the essential details, as presented to us in the first segment, remain unaltered throughout. We’ve watched the situation brought to its conclusion, with the Zoom call ensuring that we’ve met most of our point-of-view characters in the segments. The thing is, I could see this working if the film were told from a single perspective (or location) at a time, with a theoretical 20-minute countdown timer going on, rather than the strange pairs that Oppenheim went with. There’s a flood of information here rather than a trickle. I think the gamble of potentially boring the audience with the launch procedure for a B-21 Raider or the bus ride to Raven Rock (a self-sufficient city under a mountain that we briefly see) would be worth it for the broadness of its perspective and the closeness we’d have with our characters for those brief moments.
On the other hand, it might mean that Oppenheim would press even harder into melodrama territory, which is the biggest flaw in most of these “hypothetical nuclear scenario” tales like Jacobsen’s “non-fiction narrative.” The subject matter is frightening enough as it is, and the application of these details in a subtler manner might be powerful. Instead of knowing that Ferguson’s character has a son with a cold, and that she woke up early to play with him before heading to the White House, and then witnessing her husband fail to answer her work-phone call from an unknown number while they’re at the doctor, and then the panicked-back-and-forth when she breaks protocol and brings her cellphone into the room and calls him and tells him to get as far away from a city as they can – why not have the phone call be a crack in her steely-eyed façade, coming after the point-of-no-return has been crossed? After all, she’s enough of a stickler for protocol that she scolds a newbie for holding up the line for breakfast sandwiches with an order that’s too complex. This is to say absolutely nothing about the bullshit somersaults that Oppenheim invents for Harris’ character, who is both a widower and a father to a daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) who lives in Chicago, and who does something that strains the entire film’s credulity near the end. Oppenheim is just too theatrical to complement Bigelow’s process-centric filmmaking, and if he’d penned Zero Dark Thirty, Jessica Chastain’s CIA agent’s hunt for Bin Laden would have been fueled by vengeance for the daughter she lost in WTC 1 on 9/11.**
Yet even if Oppenheim turned in a Grade-A screenplay (for a streaming miniseries, perhaps), I doubt Bigelow would have been the filmmaker to convey an anti-proliferation message adequately. Such is the problem for a filmmaker who desperately wants to document the functioning arms of the Military-Industrial Complex as they are, but whose exemplary skills lie in crafting credible, thrilling action. Like the French fellow (may have) said, making an anti-war movie with those talents means you wind up making a regular war picture. Despite intertitles that scream slogans and occasional references to the ethical discourse in dialogue (such as the title, which Elba cites during his flight on Marine One), an anti-nuclear weapons picture filmed in this style stops being a cry for disarmament. It becomes more about modernizing the nuclear shield against threats like these, which I believe runs counter to the film’s goals – the focus shifts away from “Dear God, this could happen at any moment!” to “Dear God, why don’t those interceptor missiles work?” Had a movie like this existed when Reagan was prepping the Strategic Defense Initiative and wasting the last years of Edward Teller’s life, one could see it cited as an exhibit in congressional testimony. The issue becomes less that the house is filled with dynamite, and more that the fire extinguishers stored in the basement may or may not be empty.
As a glowing cherry on top of the radioactive sundae Bigelow and Oppenheim have prepared, A House of Dynamite ends on a cop-out of epic proportions, which makes the efforts expended over the preceding two hours all for naught. For all the hemming and hawing about whether or not Chris Nolan was justified in limiting the perspective in Oppenheimer to the practical experiences of its main character***, at least there was a well-stated ethos for it, with the conflict coming from theory becoming practice and the spiritual toll it took on the Man Behind Manhattan, who watched the catastrophic aftermath of his choices on newsreels well-after the fact. Oppenheim’s goal, I guess, is to suggest that there’s no choice anyone could have made to avert a grand tragedy in a process designed to fail from the minute the early-warning system detects the missile. The question then becomes “Well, what are you going to do about it?”
It turns out it matters a great deal if a nuclear detonation becomes a nuclear exchange, and I don’t think it’s enough to merely suggest the dilemmas that, say, Elba’s character faces here without committing to a conclusion. Had Oppenheim written Fail-Safe****, I imagine he’d have discarded that whole “eye-for-an-eye” thing and ended the picture with the Soviets’ failure to shoot down the plane. If he’d written Zero Dark Thirty, it would have ended with SEAL Team Six boarding the stealth choppers to Abbottabad. The process is Bigelow’s concern, and he’s writing the picture for her – who cares what it leads to? Yadda-yaddaing consequence makes the ethical and moral conflicts trite. But there’s one victory here that shouldn’t go unacknowledged, in that Bigelow and Oppenheim do something their characters can’t: They’re able to blunt A House of Dynamite before impact, turning the end of the world into a briefly scary reminder of its potential, soon to be shuffled out of mind with the rest of the close calls and duds that fell back to Earth before they even had a chance to go sub-orbital.
*Regarding that book, what a way for her to recover from that Area 51 mess – apparently reporting that Stalin sent genetically-engineered little people in experimental aircraft to Roswell to kick off a UFO panic is a-okay, just as long as you get back to serious business two or three books later.
** It’s also telling who gets the empathetic backgrounds – Letts’s character, the most hawkish out of those assembled, is humanized by his enthusiasm about Francisco Lindor’s performance in the All-Star Game rather than having a sick child or a relative in Chicago.
*** Remember, Jim Cameron may be setting out to make an entire feature as a rebuttal to Nolan’s lacking portrayal of the horrors inflicted on the people of Hiroshima.
**** By the time this hits theaters, we’ll be less than two weeks removed from another filmmaker trying and failing to cover a similar topic to one Lumet tackled and failing to do so with the same grace.