Kathryn Bigelow Ponders America At DEFCON 1 In A House of Dynamite
A countdown to annihilation becomes an audit of governmental competence in the director’s latest ticking clock thriller.
Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite is an armageddon procedural divided into three acts. The worst has come to pass: A nuclear missile of unknown provenance heads toward Chicago. Scattered across the apparatus of American power, a response mounts in remote defense facilities, subterranean bunkers, and dispassionate corridors of control, sketching the geography of a government that has fortified itself far from those it’s tasked with defending. The response can’t take place where people live; it must happen where people decide.
There is a pertinent and distressing question that Bigelow’s ticking clock thriller wants the viewer to ask. If the United States lost a city in a single, violent instant, what would happen next? It’s a query far above most folks’ pay grade, to be sure, which makes the film in its better moments so engrossing. Working from a screenplay by Noah Oppenheim (Zero Day), Bigelow reconstructs the procedures of alert with crackling fidelity. Its abrupt shifts, from the relative comfort of DEFCON 4 (where we see people munching Doritos and chugging coffee) to a tense DEFCON 2 and finally to the Worst Case Scenario, establish a rhythm that comes to define the film: calm turned to confusion turned to dread. Build and release. Again and again and again.
This steely, apocalyptic tone owes something to John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May and Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide, though Bigelow’s approach is more clinical than those films were inventive. It’s gripping, like a dental exam is gripping. Any hint of pop entertainment—a reminder that this is armchair political fiction, plausible as it may be, rather than a didactic lecture—is brief, like the screens at STRATCOM labeled “The Big Board,” à la Dr. Strangelove. I suppose some gallows humor can be gleaned from the deer-in-headlight reactions of characters watching this crisis unfold, their disbelief articulated later by the worst question you’d ever want to hear in this moment: “Is there a plan for this?”
That’s what Bigelow is driving at: There are no heroes in bunkers, only deciders. As the missile speeds toward its target, the film explores the tension between performance anxiety and the illogic of imminent mass death. A missile defense base (led by Anthony Ramos) narrows the suspects to North Korea, Russia, and China, making an already horrific situation almost comically amorphous. From there, it falls to the American top brass (embodied by the likes of Tracy Letts, Jason Clarke, Jared Harris, and Idris Elba) to make the unenviable choice whether to retaliate blindly or cling to the dwindling, surreal hope that this launch is some kind of fluke or dud. Their deliberations boil down to a bleak line delivered by the Deputy National Security Advisor (a breathless Gabriel Brasso): “Surrender, or suicide.”
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
