A House Of Dynamite Review: Kathryn Bigelow's Paranoiac Thriller Is Boring Earnestness Of The Highest Order

Two distinctly different depictions of Cold War nuclear paranoia were released in 1964 by two distinctly different luminaries. Stanley Kubrick saw an inherent ridiculousness and stupidity in the powers that pulled the levers, and so opted for a black comedy in Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Sidney Lumet, meanwhile, was more sober in his earnest portrait of serious men doing serious things with Fail Safe. It is Kubrick’s film that has stayed ensconced in the cultural zeitgeist, a reflection, perhaps, of just how absurd nuclear warfare continues to be.

Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite is uncomfortably situated between these two polarities. Which is not to say there’s anything funny about Bigelow’s approach, which is leaden in self-seriousness, but her conception of America as an innocent animal caught in a trap is naive at best, manipulative at worst. Noah Oppenheim’s script is so genuine in its attempt to cast American politicians and military leaders as good-willed and even-keeled that the film nearly comes off as propagandist.

A House Of Dynamite Is Almost Shocking In Its Boring Earnestness

That isn’t to say that Bigelow’s film doesn’t contain some compelling, latent questions about America’s ability to handle an apocalyptic event. Told in a three-act, chronologically repetitious structure, A House of Dynamite wonders if an overstuffed, $50 billion military budget can actually backfire in moments of extreme crisis, whereby avenues of communication are clogged. Though that format is wearisome and exhausting, it does, to Bigelow’s credit, highlight the inherent vulnerability of a system of protocols in the face of annihilation.

But it is still an odd approach that squanders its own momentum more often than it aids that intentionality. Considering the film is dependent on the tension of “what if,” the decision to repeatedly go back in time to the start of the same day has diminishing returns once we know (at least most of) the answer to that question.

Bigelow has certainly stacked the cards as much as she can in her favor with a heavy-hitting cast of actors. The first chapter uses Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) as its anchor. A captain in the White House Situation Room (WHSR), Walker is such a veteran at her job that she even knows what breakfast to order at the stand just outside the room to keep the line moving (egg sandwich, never an omelette). It’s early in the day, but Walker has been awake with her feverish child and is stumbling into work thanks to a misplaced dinosaur toy in her high-heeled shoes.

Walker, her boss Admiral Miller (Jason Clarke), and the rest of the team find out that a nuclear object has been fired at the continental United States in a manner that seems similar to past practice tests, but as the object gets closer, they realize this is no delusion but the real McCoy. The film is thrust into action with all its itinerant chaos, as the situation room tries to handle both the seeming inevitability of the incineration of Chicago with their own personal baggage.

This is the type of real-time thriller that is dependent on verisimilitude, and the film is successful in accentuating the inherent tension of a workplace where phones are constantly ringing, the keys are click-clacking, and no one is properly rested or fed. Bigelow relies mainly on Barry Ackroyd’s shaky, handheld camera, but also dollops in footage from security cameras and news alerts to create a holistic documentary feel. But it’s all one-note, and as soon as the film reveals its fractured format, Bigelow’s established tension dissipates like a broken soufflé.

The second chapter shifts mostly to General Brady (Tracy Letts), a more hawkish military leader at a nuclear base in Nebraska, and Defense Secretary Baker (Jared Harris), who is aghast at the situation but mostly frozen in fear. The final chapter moves to the President (Idris Elba), perpetually out of breath with anxiety, and his young handler, Lieutenant Commander Robert Reeves (Jonah Hauer-King), who is eerily still.

Bigelow and Oppenheim’s mission is more focused on the way the situation might be handled rather than the results of its eventual action, and thereby tell on themselves. The real tension of the film is not whether the bomb will fall on Chicago, but whether America would act with level-headedness in extreme global warfare. But on that score, the film feels woefully naive. Every character here is noble, aware, kind, and courteous. The film suggests America is ill-prepared but ultimately acting in good faith — and that these characters are fundamentally honest actors in the game of nuclear disarmament.

Harris’s Baker calls out that America has the largest military budget in the world by a wide margin on a conference call, all while the film suggests the country’s plausible innocence, which goes largely unexplored. Much mention is made about the fear of being caught “with our pants down,” as China, North Korea, and Russia “desperately” seek power and resources, and thereby Bigelow’s film feels bizarrely cut out of the same post-9/11 nationalism that birthed similar media like 24.

As referenced with its title, A House of Dynamite is honest about the foolhardy way nuclear powers have perpetually built themselves on the very weapons that may cause their downfall, but Kubrick once understood the humor in that irony. Bigelow’s film, disconnected as it is from the very people this type of situation would actually harm, is a futile salute towards hope, which unfairly assumes powerful people’s positive intentions, underscored here by largely cookie-cutter characters and a lack of complexity.

The film’s noncommittal ending will make fans of The Sopranos shudder in traumatic recognition. Bigelow and Oppenheim may be going for a critique of America’s posturing as the only adults in the room, but if that is the case, then the approach is disturbingly misguided. And if we’re forced to watch the end of the world, one wishes it were at least exciting.