New York 2025 Review: A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE, The Last Minutes of the World As We Know It
On a seemingly ordinary morning, a nuclear missile is launched somewhere out of the Pacific Ocean and is on a trajectory to hit Chicago in about 20 minutes.
On a military base in Alaska, the officers who first detected the missile attempt to intercept it, to no avail. The employees of the White House, Pentagon, Strategic Command, and Federal Emergency Management Agency are striving to execute the necessary protocols.
In a high-profile Zoom meeting, generals and ministers try to determine who could be responsible. Was it North Korea? Russia? China? The president, represented by a black square in the video conference up until the final third of the film, is informed that he needs to formulate a response and potentially retaliate against someone – or everyone.
Eight years after Detroit, an underappreciated drama about social unrest in America of the 1960s, Kathryn Bigelow comes back with a new feature, A House of Dynamite. Tangentially, this latest film also has a connection to the period, as it fits perfectly with the tradition of alarmist thrillers of that era, largely inspired by the Cuban Missile Crisis, such as Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe (1964), James B. Harris’ The Bedford Incident (1965), and others. Bigelow and the author of the screenplay, ironically named Noah Oppenheim (the former president of NBC News), also draw the suspense straight from the headlines, even though it works regardless.
While the events on screen only last less than 20 minutes, the authors use a multi-plot structure to expand it into a 112-minute nail-biting operation, dividing the story into three segments. In each one, we basically see the same events from the perspectives of different groups of people, gradually moving upward in the echelons of power. Thus, there is no clear protagonist here, just as there are no heroes in a traditional sense of the word.
Instead of one point of reference, we have multiple ones: a communication point at the White House (Rebecca Ferguson), whose little son is running a fever; a young and appropriately idealistic Deputy National Security Advisor (Gabriel Basso), whose wife is pregnant with their first child; a high-ranking general (Tracy Letts) with a penchant for sarcasm; an expert on North Korea (Greta Lee), who was supposed to have a day off; the Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris), whose estranged daughter happens to live in Chicago – and so on.
While Bigelow is an undisputed master of suspense, the dramatic aspect isn’t the strongest suit of A House of Dynamite, precisely because we don’t really get to know any of these people, only getting the faintest outline of their circumstances. All of them have goals, agendas, and hopes that make the impending Apocalypse all the more unfortunate; then again, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.
The gallery of close-ups of teared-up faces and clenched hands that the film, at times, turns into is generally not the most convincing part of it. There is also the issue of the tonal dissonance between the movie trying to be serious and entertaining at the same time, as well as the divisive finale, even though the authors didn't really have a lot of narrative leeway to end it any differently. Within some of the film’s major flaws, though, also lies its major strengths.
For Bigelow, the potential catastrophe – the fate of Chicago and possibly the rest of the world – isn’t a chance for a big-budget spectacle, but rather for the exploration of the chaos that ensues. Unlike another disturbing ‘60s classic, Peter Watkins’ The War Game (1966), which very realistically depicted the consequences of a nuclear war (so realistically that this mockumentary was awarded an Oscar as the best doc), A House of Dynamite doesn’t show the event itself, freezing at the precipice of a disaster.
The effect is just as chilling, while we are shown, time and again, the randomness of it all: the high-priced equipment failing, and people whom we entrust with making hard decisions and pushing important buttons, being just as confused as the rest of us, desperately digging for memos and binders with instructions. The real horror here isn’t that this totally random end-of-the-world scenario is, in fact, realistic – once again, we already know that from the headlines -- but that when a high-ranking man calls his wife for advice, the connection fails before she can impart any much-needed wisdom.
The film opens October 10 in select theaters and will begin streaming October 24, exclusively on Netflix.
