Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, her first film in eight years, doesn’t provide any new information on what the fallout of a nuclear attack would be. Rather, it’s a grim encapsulation of the consequences when things “go according to plan.”
Bigelow borrowed a page from Akira Kurosawa in the composition of A House of Dynamite, in which the same stressful stretch of time is depicted three times from different perspectives. In all three segments, an unknown missile is launched from a remote location without a known political affiliation or recognizable enemy. There isn’t a declaration of war or an international crisis that would seemingly spark such an attack; the villains of A House of Dynamite are as ambiguous as those in Top Gun: Maverick. However, any suggestion that this may be a “drill” or an unreported satellite launch are quickly denied after a failed attempt to knock the projectile off of its intended path. It’s a given that the United States will be hit, and that the death toll will rank in the millions; the only question is how the world will respond.
Bigelow’s politics are ambiguous, with The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty praised as jingoistic propaganda and traitorous anti-military showboating by critics on both sides of the aisle. A House of Dynamite’s assertion that nuclear weapons are bad isn’t going to be controversial, even if the film’s suggestion is that a mass-scale tragedy has been inevitable since 1945. Like all of Bigelow’s films, A House of Dynamite is a drama about a group of knowledgeable, skilled characters tasked with finding a solution to a crisis. Whether these characters are hypocritical, unsparing, or unqualified may be up to interpretation, but there’s nothing about their situation that’s attractive. The fact that Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim clearly did their research is proof enough that A House of Dynamite isn’t a fear-mongering frightener with desire to promote an agenda, but a legitimate act of intellectual curiosity.
The first of A House of Dynamite’s three sections is centered on a communications office that intercepted the first signs that an attack was imminent. It’s an effective way to start the film because it's the most tethered to characters an audience might be able to identify with; Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) is responsible for the surveillance of global airways, but she’s also a caring mother who had to leave her needy child at home in order to get to work. The human drama is where A House of Dynamite is weakest, as it’s more challenging to write an intimate moment between a husband and wife than meticulously going through the military chain-of-command. However, Ferguson’s performance does carry a maternal authority that’s slowly chipped away by the severity of the situation. Although her chipper professionalism is initially a soothing presence to William Davis (Malachi Beasley), the Senior Chief Petty Officer responsible for the control room, Walker’s confidence is withered away when her superior Admiral Mark Miller (Jason Clarke) is whisked away to the Situation Room. Clarke, an underrated actor who’s made the most of small parts, shows the fear of a respected leader who’s made to understand that he may never see his underlings again.
Miller’s one of the central figures in the second chunk of A House of Dynamite, when the military chiefs gather to discuss the ramifications. Although it's chilling to see how quick these leaders are to accept the inevitability that Chicago will be wiped off the map, it's made clear that the most important decision is how the United States will respond. There may not be enough information to determine whether a war is about to begin, but the precautions taken by other nations could potentially spark an even more disastrous scenario. The strategic perspectives of General Anthony Brody (Tracy Letts) and Secretary of Defense Reid Baker (Jared Harris) illuminate the merits of different responses; while the appearance of helplessness could invite further strikes, a quick proportional response could make it seem as if the United States has taken advantage of an opportunity to make use of its nuclear arsenal.
The Situation Room chaos is made to feel like a throwback to the best of 24 and The West Wing. Although there’s a moment in which Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) is forced to plead with a Chinese military strategist to use common sense in their reactions, it's preceded by a turgid comedy-of-errors in which his trip to reach the Situation Room is offset by traffic. There’s also some of the most vapid political commentary in a series of scenes that involve Ann Park (Greta Lee), a senior member of the NSA who’s called to offer her perspective while on her vacation. Even if Bigelow wanted to remind the audience about America’s complicated relationship with its culture of warfare, there must’ve been a better way to hint at these ideas than to prominently feature a Civil War reenactment.
This blend of blunt despair and procedural consequence is epitomized by the film’s final third, in which Idris Elba’s unnamed President of the United States is cursed with indecisiveness as various plans are proposed to him by advisors. It’s not made clear if Elba’s character is meant to represent a specific modern Commander-in-Chief; while there’s a hint of a Biden-like sense of sleepiness, a Trumpian love of media, an Obama level of campaign afterglow, and Bush’s lack of eloquence, his defining characteristic is being unqualified. The term “unfit” is an empty insult until it actually matters; of all the scary moments in A House of Dynamite, the notion of an amateur with the fate of the world in his hands is the most terrifying.