If you were born after Hiroshima, you've spent your whole life seeing — or at least knowing of — movies about the atomic bomb. From the ruthless '60s satire Dr. Strangelove to the '80s TV sensation The Day After to 21st Century thrillers like The Sum of All Fears, filmmakers keep imagining the ways that nuclear weapons can lead to cataclysm.
The latest to do so is A House of Dynamite, a white-knuckle Netflix movie that opens first in cinemas and hits the streamer itself on Oct. 24. I encourage you to see it in a theater because it's directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who's not merely the first woman to win the best director Oscar — she's unsurpassed at action and suspense. Although I normally try to avoid clichés, A House of Dynamite literally did have me on the edge of my seat.
The action begins when a military tracking station spots a single nuclear warhead, origin unknown, heading toward the U.S. mainland. If not shot down, it will hit in 20 minutes. For the rest of the movie, we leapfrog among the characters who are trying to stop that missile, figure out who launched it — Putin? Iran? North Korea? China pretending to be North Korea? — and to come up with a response that won't lead to Armageddon.
If the premise is straightforward, the telling is not. The film loops back and repeats the same 20 minute period three times over, as we watch different people confront the threat. In the first, which is about trying to stop the ICBM, we flit between a major at an Alaskan missile outpost — that's Anthony Ramos — and the military officer running the White House situation room. She's played by Rebecca Ferguson, who you'll know from Mission Impossible.
The second part centers on two tacticians: a deputy national security advisor, played by Gabriel Basso, who's urging a cautious response, and the general in charge of STRATCOM — that's Tracy Letts — who fears that caution could lead to America's destruction. Finally, the third part centers on the secretary of defense, played by Jared Harris, and the president, played by Idris Elba. He's presented with a menu featuring different levels of retaliatory slaughter and has the agonizing task of deciding who, if anyone, to nuke.
While all the characters are defined by their jobs, Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim give each a hint of their human dimension — be it the complacent charisma of Elba's president, Ferguson fighting back tears then soldiering on, or Harris — an actor of great vulnerability — falling into despair when he grasps the bomb will hit the city where his daughter lives. All are honorable and good at their jobs. Letts' general is not one of those hair-trigger Strangelovean psychopaths familiar from most thrillers. He's a rational man — and baseball fan — trying to do the right thing.
Like that '60s war horse Fail Safe, A House of Dynamite reminds us that America's nuclear defense is based on elaborate protocols that offer an illusion of control. Yet once that unexplained missile shows up on the radar, the system instantly starts dissolving. The missile defenses don't work — it's like trying to hit a bullet with a bullet, as they say here. You can't get Putin's guy on the phone, and our North Korea specialist has the day off. Or the encrypted video conference starts breaking up. Endless planning can't tell you what to do when the choice is between surrender and suicide.
While all of this is unnerving, it's also thrilling to watch. Bigelow directs with a maestro's lucid precision, perfectly orchestrating the complicated shifts from person to person, time frame to time frame. We can follow exactly where we are and what's going on. Every moment pops, from Barry Ackroyd's alert cinematography, to Kirk Baxter's jittery-but-controlled editing, to Volker Bertelmann's score whose shifts keep ratcheting up the tension. While the script's ending is a tad too oblique for my taste, the movie still packs a wallop.
And rightly. Bigelow is tackling something important, especially now when the world's nuclear arsenals are increasingly controlled by aggressive nationalists. Yet, it's unlikely that her warning about all the world's nukes will have any greater effect on the real world than the scads of cautionary movies that came before. Sad to say, A House of Dynamite is likely to be remembered not for making us any safer but for being so darn exciting.
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