Kathryn Bigelow Thriller Needs Bigger Fuse

These days, there are so many reasons to wake up in the middle of the night, bathed in your own cold sweat: the erosion of basic civil liberties, the rising tide of authoritarian rule (and lack of a rapid-response political resistance), the increasing number of goon squads conspicuously showing up in American cities, the sustained popularity of Love Is Blind. Kathryn Bigelow is here to remind you of one more waking nightmare that you may have conveniently forgotten about: the chance of an impromptu nuclear holocaust! A House of Dynamite, which drops on Netflix today after a three-week theatrical run, opens with the statement, “At the end of the Cold War, global powers reached a consensus that the world would be better off with fewer nuclear weapons.” Then the Hurt Locker director drops the hammer: “That era is now over.” Great. Awesome. Where did I put those Xanax again?

An Oscar-winning filmmaker who specializes in profile-in-courage portraits of professionalism and thrillers that shred even the most steel-belted nervous systems, Bigelow is completely in her element with this story of how easy it might be for a rogue power to launch an attack on the United States. And for the first 30 or so minutes of the exercise in extreme what-if–ism, you genuinely feel your blood pressure spiking. Everything initially seems perfectly normal on this morning in America. A major (Anthony Ramos) at a missile-defense base snipes at a co-worker about eating chips on duty. A four-star general (Tracy Letts) chats about last night’s ballgame while waltzing into a command center in Nebraska. Pilots stationed in the South Pacific take an early morning dip in the sea. Various Beltway workers catch the bus or commute into D.C. with their significant others, including Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson). She’s been up half the night with a feverish kid, but hey, someone’s gotta run the White House Situation Room.

When an alert signals that some random ICBM in mid-flight has just been spotted — exactly where it was launched from and by whom is unknown — no one is particularly concerned. The idea is that someone is conducting tests, or possibly making a passive-aggressive power flex in the region; it’s the third time something like this has happened since Christmas, Walker notes to her superior (Jason Clarke). Then one of the soldiers in Alaska notes that the “inclination is flattening” for the identified flying object. Translation: This is not a test. And if the missile is not stopped by the military’s ground-based interceptors, it’s likely to make impact somewhere around the city of Chicago in about 19 minutes.

Once the threat level jumps to Defcon 1, so does the movie, and the cross-cutting between various parties issuing emergency orders and assessing the situation in terse acronym-heavy jargon begins in earnest. Watching high-ranking officials gravely discussing potential death rates, possible motives, and likely bad actors that may be responsible (could be Russia, could be North Korea, there’s a lot of chatter happening in the Middle East), you’re reminded what’s been missing on screens since Bigelow gave us Detroit in 2017. Few working directors know how to tighten screws with more efficiency and effectiveness, not to mention that she knows a thing or two about ticking time bombs. Her first film in eight years underlines Bigelow’s facility for making authentic political potboilers paced somewhere between “relentless” and “total fucking panic attack.”

Then, with touchdown imminent, evacuations in full swing, and everyone waiting for orders from the commander-in-chief, the clock is suddenly reset. We’re back to square one, with everything now seen from new angles and different perspectives. Folks who may have been fleeting presences, or reduced to talking heads in tiny squares on a group Zoom — like the secretary of defense (Jared Harris) or a fresh-faced deputy national security adviser (The Night Agent‘s Gabriel Basso) — become lead protagonists. Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim will do this a third time before A House of Dynamite is done, relighting its fuse so we can eventually follow the film’s POTUS (Idris Elba) as he wrestles with the moral dilemma of To Bomb or Not to Bomb? But it’s somewhere within the middle of that first rewind that you begin to realize, with a feeling of dread in your belly: This is not the Armageddon procedural you’re looking for.

If the idea was to create extra tension by continually going back to zero and ramping up to 100 mph, the end result is merely a series of deflations that keeps slowing the momentum. It feels less like an extension or expansion of an in-progress catastrophe and more like a cheap formal gimmick. And if the notion that following a host of individuals will offer a panoply of responses to the unthinkable, it might help to actually develop those individuals past a few traits and tics (this person’s wife is pregnant, this person has a daughter in Chicago, this person is the first lady). We never thought we’d say this, but we actually wished that Bigelow had slowed things down a tad, giving these characters room to breathe, and us a chance to know them better before reducing them to ants scurrying around a kicked anthill. The thought of her going full Robert Altman with an ensemble piece like this is tantalizing in theory. But when you’re giving first-rate actors just enough to not be background players, yet not enough for viewers to become fully invested in any of them, you’ve got a serious problem on your hands.

In a perfect world, A House of Dynamite would either boil everything down to an extra-taut 90 minutes, pulling and stretching that 19-minute warning like taffy and leading up to a series of simultaneously colliding climaxes. Or it would be more than three hours long, and allow audiences to truly get to know some of these policy wonks, security experts, and military brass. We personally would have watched a whole film devoted to Letts’ general and his second-in-command, played by Gbenga Akinnagbe. Nobody can toss off authoritative snark or deliver dialogue through gritted teeth better than the playwright-actor, and Akinnagbe is the type of performer who excels in fleshing out supporting parts (his work in The Wire alone is a testament to making the most of minimal screen time). The double act they have in the middle section makes you lean in every time they exchange thoughts on what brought them to this do-or-die moment. Then the movie switches away to somebody somewhere else wringing hands and barking into phones, stopping just long enough to let you register that, right, Greta Lee and Moses Ingram and Kaitlyn Dever are in this drama as well, kinda sorta, and you find yourself slumping back in your seat.

There’s a moment late in A House of Dynamite where we find ourselves in the cockpit of a jet, receiving incoming orders that they should be ready to drop a payload should POTUS decide that’s the course of action. Then we quickly cut to a sign in a military command center under a map charting the missile’s arc, which says: The Big Board. A Dr. Strangelove shoutout by any other name smells just as sweet. What the film strives for, of course, is to be the serious version of Strangelove — something like Fail-Safe, the 1964 thriller that tackled the same topic with a doomsday rigor and the shadow of Shiva hovering over every tightly edited sequence and every claustrophobic close-up. Even before an ending designed to avoid resolution and cause moviegoers to stifle screams of “Wait, seriously?” this well-intentioned look at how close we are to the brink of extinction is the cinematic equivalent of an unexploded ordnance. For something so blessed with timeliness and talent, it leaves you feeling like you’re buried in a hovel of disappointment.