A House of Dynamite

Rebecca Ferguson

Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite left me with mixed feelings though I did think this film was a marked improvement over her last one, Detroit. Noah Oppenheim's script, in three parts, depicts the response by various components of the US government and military trying to thwart an incoming ICBM that is poised to strike Chicago. The missile was launched by an unknown adversary, nettling a military response. The separate parts of the film all roughly cover the same time span, but focus on different command posts, such as the White House, SAC Command in Nebraska, and a missile site in Alaska. The three part structure has its advantages. Chiefly, the film displays the lack of time and options faced by those in positions of power when a nuclear threat is imminent. A House of Dynamite is a procedural film about the futility of procedure in such a situation.

However, this approach also has its drawbacks. There is so much leaping about from location to location that it tends to flatten out the efforts of the ensemble cast. There are memorable performances in the film, I admired the efforts of Greta Lee, Jared Harris,Tracy Letts, and Gabriel Basso, but too many of the characters come out under drawn and colorless, particularly Rebecca Ferguson's Captain and Idris Elba's President. Zero Dark Thirty did a much better job portraying military and government functionaries. Greta Lee's character, an expert on Korea, is attending a Civil War reenactment at Gettysburg with her young son and this gives Bigelow an opportunity to skewer the American tendency to look back nostalgically on war as spectacle. She makes it clear that America will have no opportunity to look back nostalgically on a nuclear confrontation.

Like Fail Safe and The Bedford Incident, A House of Dynamite bogs down in endless shots of officials intoning portents of doom while standing before video and radar screens. Bigelow and Oppenheim want to be Cassandras here, but this largely inert film will tend to lull viewers rather than spark righteous indignation.