Kathryn Bigelow is justly hailed as a great action filmmaker. She’s less appreciated for her skills as a portraitist, and specifically a portraitist of highly intelligent people doing extraordinarily difficult, complex, high-stakes work. “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012), a tough-minded thriller about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, made a grimly focussed study of a C.I.A. analyst embracing her killer instincts to the full extent that her job demanded. “The Hurt Locker” (2009), set during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, was less a conventional war picture than a coolly engrossing rendering of a genius technician who found himself exactly where he wanted to be, dismantling bombs around Baghdad with devil-may-care nonchalance. Here was a guy—and here, too, was a filmmaker—who knew how to handle an explosive. Few other American directors better understand the authority that restrained realism can bring to bear on life-or-death material, or the way that character reveals itself through action.
That’s why the nuclear-countdown thriller “A House of Dynamite,” which is playing in select theatres ahead of an October 24th streaming début, on Netflix, feels like such a bewildering misuse of Bigelow’s talents. The movie, which posits an impending nuclear strike on a major American city, is a flimsy yet high-minded piece of doomsday schlock, largely populated by ciphers in suits and drained of the pulp pleasures that schlock, at its best, can afford. It’s one of those hyper-adrenalized control-room affairs: a clock ticks away in the background, everyone speaks in chunky government acronyms, and a worst-case scenario plays out on multiple fronts, from the first lines of defense to the upper corridors of power. “A House of Dynamite” yearns to be a contemporary “Fail Safe” or “Seven Days in May,” a speculative nail-biter for our times. But, when the experience was over, my cuticles were entirely intact, and, throughout, the only alarm I could muster was for Bigelow—a creeping fear that she had gone to battle with mediocre material and lost.
It begins on a seemingly ordinary morning in America, but none of it actually feels ordinary, because the movie takes such pains to emphasize that ordinariness. The script, by Noah Oppenheim (who wrote the script for Pablo Larraín’s bio-pic “Jackie”), filters its anxieties through a strained and mechanical approximation of workplace small talk, in which every attempt at offhandedness feels on the nose. The characters, almost all government employees, are filled in like cells on a spreadsheet; the lucky ones are allotted a box in the “Personal Drama” column. At a missile-defense base in Fort Greely, Alaska, Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) steps outside for a tense phone call, presumably with his significant other. In Washington, D.C., an unhappy-looking FEMA employee named Cathy Rogers (Moses Ingram) jabbers about her upcoming divorce as she strides toward her office, where she’ll spend an early stretch of her workday checking out Zillow listings. (Spoiler alert: she won’t need them.)
Happier, at least initially, is Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), who kisses her husband and young son goodbye before heading off to work at the White House. Ferguson gives what is easily the film’s strongest performance, partly because she’s magnetic enough to find an actual character—crisp, efficient, no-nonsense—beneath a mass of quotidianisms. I could watch a ten-minute montage of Walker making her way through White House security, sniping at a slowpoke in the breakfast line, locking away her personal cellphone, and then striding into the Situation Room, where an enormous screen is about to light up with some very bad news.
In short order, Fort Greely picks up on an intercontinental ballistic-missile launch from somewhere in the Pacific—presumably just a test, and one that will splash down in the Sea of Japan. Suddenly, though, the target shifts: “Inclination is flattening,” someone notes, and even viewers who don’t have their parabola calculators handy will guess, from the strain in her voice, what is happening. Before long, the stakes come into terrifying focus: the missile will strike Chicago in less than twenty minutes. Rogers, the FEMA employee, projects that roughly ten million people will be killed, and another ten million will die in the subsequent fallout. Those death tolls, of course, will be just the beginning, depending on how apocalyptic a retaliation campaign the U.S. decides to pursue—a question complicated by the fact that no one knows which country initiated the attack. Satellites failed to detect the initial launch, the first mistake in an escalating chain of errors, including multiple bungled attempts to intercept or destroy the missile, that expose what a crapshoot our system of nuclear defense is.
This, then, is the way the world ends: not with a bang or a whimper (any actual impact is left off camera) but with agitated flurries of office chatter. It will also end with many ominous musical rumbles—Glarrrrggghhh! Glarrrrggghhh!—which mean to twist your guts in a knot, but which instead attack this movie’s sombre intentions like a bad case of flatulence. The score is by Volker Bertelmann, whose monotonous musical stylings you may recall from “All Quiet on the Western Front” (2022) and “Conclave” (2024). For “A House of Dynamite,” he has composed yet another attack of the groans, and it has the effect of making some of the dialogue sound even more tin-eared than it would in isolation. At one point, the President of the United States (Idris Elba) complains, “This is insanity!” An underling’s unaccountably straight-faced reply: “No, sir. This is reality.” Glarrrrggghhh!
Oppenheim must have been pleased with that exchange; he makes us listen to it more than once. “A House of Dynamite” is repetitive by design; it’s a crisis symphony in three movements, each one covering the same harrowing stretch of time, but from the perspectives of different government operations and agencies. After the first chapter, toggling between Fort Greely and the Situation Room, the film rewinds and replays the same scenario from further up the ladder, this time largely pitting the peace-minded deputy national-security adviser, Jake Baerington (a likable Gabriel Basso), against a hawkish senior military officer, General Anthony Brody (a punchable Tracy Letts). The possible perpetrators are duly considered; panicky phone calls are made to the Russian Foreign Minister, plus a North Korea expert, Ana Park (Greta Lee), who, in a particularly ham-fisted bit of thematic irony, happens to be attending a Battle of Gettysburg reënactment when her phone rings. When, oh when, will the bloodshed of history end?
The third chapter zeroes in on the President and Reid Baker (Jared Harris), the Secretary of Defense, neither of whom exactly rises to the occasion; the higher up the chain of command we go, the less effectual the leadership becomes. The President is peevish and out of his depth, and Elba gives a head-scratchingly off-key performance; he seems as uncertain about how to play this POTUS as this POTUS is about how to save the world. The Defense Secretary, meanwhile, vanishes into a personal fog, thinking only of his daughter (Kaitlyn Dever), who lives in Chicago. I was reminded of an episode, from 2005, of the real-time counterterrorism series “24,” in which a government tech whiz, learning of a nuclear power-plant meltdown, tries in vain to evacuate his mother remotely. Throughout the film, Bigelow samples the jittery formal syntax of shows like “24” and movies like Paul Greengrass’s 9/11 docudrama “United 93” (2006), which turn workplaces into war zones and create a prolonged sense of immersion. But “A House of Dynamite” is too segmented to achieve the same momentum, and the three-part structure is at once gimmicky and maddeningly obtuse. Every time the plot hits the reset button, the tension flatlines.
Little of this plays to Bigelow’s strengths. She has directed at least one screw-tightening nuclear-crisis movie before, the Soviet-submarine thriller “K-19: The Widowmaker” (2002). But, at her best, she has a gift for making the passage of time feel loose, hypnotic, and poetically indeterminate, not artificially manipulated and pressurized. She’s a master at subtly fleshing out the inner lives of real people doing their jobs under real working conditions. That’s not the kind of thing you can achieve with this sort of brisk and superficial “24” cosplay, no matter how much immaculate D.C. production design it comes packaged with. Even as a title, “A House of Dynamite” is an eye-roller—a windy mouthful of metaphor, especially from a director whose previous film titles have often shown a flair for tersely evocative language (“Near Dark,” “Strange Days,” “Point Break”).
Bigelow has often been accused of being apolitical—or, because of her fascination with the codes, rites, and aesthetics of men at war, of advancing a gung-ho fetishization of American militarism. In the wider-ranging bureaucratic panorama of “A House of Dynamite,” she offers up such a pessimistic view of a U.S. disaster response, even with a more functional and competent government than the one we have at present, that it’s hard to read any of it as propagandistic—or, for that matter, politically specific. (Certain character details suggest a grab bag of bipartisan associations: a woman briefing the White House press corps is a dead ringer for Jen Psaki, former President Joe Biden’s first press secretary. Elba’s President is doing a photo op with young basketball players when disaster strikes—a kinder version of the moment when President George W. Bush first received word of the September 11th attacks, during a Florida elementary-school reading of “The Pet Goat.”)
In another crucial respect, “A House of Dynamite” feels like a decisive break with Bigelow’s recent work. Her previous two films were both slammed for their uses and representations of violence: “Zero Dark Thirty” was accused of bending scenes of torture into a defense of torture, and “Detroit” (2017), an underappreciated drama set during the civil-rights era, was criticized for exploiting the very horrors that it sought to condemn. By contrast, “A House of Dynamite” is devoid of onscreen bloodshed, all the way up to its muted conclusion. I counted one death—an unexpectedly hilarious one—but the looming mass slaughter remains an offscreen abstraction, and perhaps even a badge of artistic restraint.
Why, then, does it feel more like a failure of nerve? I’m not suggesting that Bigelow should have depicted the destruction of a major metropolitan city and its human population; we have Roland Emmerich for that. But a large-scale disaster epic might actually have unnerved us more effectively than this wonky chamber exercise and whatever it thinks it’s doing. Like last year’s middling “September 5,” which half dramatized the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympics from the vantage of an ABC Sports crew, “A House of Dynamite” inadvertently suggests that, as a movie genre, the control-room thriller may be approaching its limitations, with clichés, evasions, and stagy tricks as formulaic as those of any blockbuster.
As it happens, there was a blockbuster earlier this year that, with no pretense to realism, conjured a frightening warning of imminent nuclear disaster. “Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning” wasn’t an especially satisfying movie, but it did feature a prickly, thoughtful war-room debate over what preëmptive action, if any, the President should take, in the chilling event of a superpowered A.I. villain seizing control of the world’s nuclear arsenals. In its own outlandish way, the film captured the sum of all fears that “A House of Dynamite” is trying to get at: the horrors of unchecked proliferation, the uncertainties of how enemies and allies alike would respond, and the mounting likelihood of global catastrophe. Exactly how plausible any of it was, I have no idea; the point was that it felt plausible, because the director and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie willed it, with unapologetic movie-movie verve, into the stuff of vividly imagined fiction. Bigelow and Oppenheim seem eager to make something far more than mere entertainment and, as a consequence, wind up with something conspicuously less. ♦
