Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Cast: Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts
Rating: (M)
★★
REVIEWED BY AMASIO JUTEL
When radars at a military fort in Alaska detect a rogue nuclear missile heading in the direction of Chicago, the US high command begins a race against the clock to identify who launched it and how to respond.
Unfortunately, the potent premise of A House of Dynamite (Netflix) fizzles out in a cloud of unrealised potential.
The psychology of the post-Bush United States military-industrial complex is a subject broached for the third time now by the film’s director.
In 2010, in a big moment for the industry, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar, for The Hurt Locker. Her gritty realist film about adrenaline-addicted bomb defusers in Iraq was immortalised in the culture, trademarking the style Bigelow would pursue.
She followed up with Zero Dark Thirty, a thriller about the manhunt for Osama Bin Laden. Five years later came Detroit, which tackled police brutality against Black people, somewhat panned for its failure to provide a meaningful conclusion for its depiction of that violence.
This empty promise of political commentary returns in A House of Dynamite, Bigelow’s third high-stakes thriller about the American military-industrial complex.
A House of Dynamite comprises three acts — three vantage points — each covering the 18 minutes before a rogue ICBM will hit Chicago. Bigelow’s honed gritty-realist style hits viewers with the terminal velocity of a nuclear warhead. The handheld integrated camerawork and tense violin-heavy score from Volker Bertelmann fly, enhancing the palpable tension each Defcon stage brings.
Act one takes place in a panicked White House Situation Room. It is the strongest act of the three, and undermines those that follow, which rehash the same situation — though act three does get the all important line of dialogue.
When asked how many nukes they should fire in response, the US President (Idris Elba) repeats something he’s heard on a podcast: "It’s like we all built a house filled with dynamite". Do you get it?
This is not the first Hollywood film in recent history about the button-pressing fantasies of the powerful — Mission: Impossible 8 or Civil War, for example.
But we’re not in Dr. Strangelove territory, interrogating the ideologies of the people making the decisions — paranoid hyper-patriots, detached technocrats. Here we’re given wife guys who feel bad they can’t get things right.
A House of Dynamite’s ambivalence about the people in charge is irresponsible, not revolutionary.
The real-life Secretary of Defence (or War, since Trump) is not a sympathetic sad dad, as portrayed by Jared Harris, but a man accused of sexual assault and spousal abuse. As General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts) says to Potus ("This is insanity"), "No Sir, this is reality," a place where A House of Dynamite refuses to reside.
