A House of Dynamite is based on a nightmare scenario. An intercontinental ballistic missile unleashed by an unidentified enemy has managed to evade detection and is making its way to the United States. The American response fails. The nuclear weapon sticks to its path.
Various war rooms in Washington, DC, with heavy-duty acronyms go into a collective huddle. At the White House, Olivia (Rebecca Ferguson) leads a team that is co-ordinating meetings with other high-ranking officials, including the unnamed President (Idris Elba), Defence Secretary Baker (Jared Harris) and military general Anthony (Tracy Letts). In Alaska, Daniel (Anthony Ramos) is commanding the military base that tries to intercept the missile.
Deputy National Security Advisor Baerington (Gabriel Basso) tries to advise the president against unleashing a full-fledged war on the possible culprits – North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, it could be anyone. Anthony tells the President to go all out against the bad guys. The Obama-like President is caught on the horns of a dilemma, unwilling to sacrifice a few to save many.
Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow’s first film in eight years is out on Netflix. Like her previous movies The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Bigelow infuses A House of Dynamite with a high degree of plausibility. There is documentary-level attention to the meeting and realistic portrayals of the protocols involved in a crisis of this nature.
Writer Noah Oppenheim stretches out the time taken for the missile to hit its target by playing the war room meeting from different points of view. While the chosen structure ratchets up the tension and allows for the fleshing out of some of the characters, it also leads to repetition.
The ticking time-bomb movie takes its scare-mongering far more seriously than other Hollywood productions about America under attack. The huddlers realise to their horror that military preparedness achieved at the cost of billions of dollars can be inadequate. It’s one thing to have hypothetical responses to such an event and another to actually implement the responses.
Various officials do what they have been trained to do, all along worrying about partners and children they may never see again. Rebecca Ferguson and Jared Harris have some solid scenes in this regard, carrying out their duties while facing the threat of personal loss.
The 112-minute movie is in the moment, bereft of commentary on America’s own massive nuclear arsenal or a debate on the country’s policy of exceptionalism. A House of Dynamite appears to be set in a pre-Trump era, in which the US government behaves in a reasonable manner and allows for different points of view. Bigelow is adept at mimicking real-world scenarios, but her white-knuckle thriller ultimately operates in the realm of a fiction that is barely of the moment.
