“A film in which the structure helps underline its questions, but works against its dramatic impact.”

Since the Cold War we have been told that the MAD principle (Mutual Assured Destruction) would prevent any of the nuclear powers from initiating an attack; any such action would guarantee annihilation of not just the power under attack, but also of the aggressor. You are not going to kill someone if that means you also get killed yourself. But as we have learnt from Camus’ The Stranger (coincidentally also premiering today in the Venice Competition, in an adaptation by François Ozon), sometimes people act irrationally. And then what? In her latest exploration of people forced to make almost impossible decisions, whether in a military or intelligence context, Kathryn Bigelow likens this situation to building a house and filling it with dynamite, and then starting to live in it. A House of Dynamite is a cautionary tale that is ostensibly about the ‘what if’ scenario of somebody bringing a burning match into this house, but the larger looming question is why we have stuffed our house with explosives anyway, and especially why we never give it a second thought.

The premise of A House of Dynamite is pretty simple: a nuclear warhead is unexpectedly launched at the United States, and there are twenty minutes to make a decision: now what? The film is ambiguous about what power actually launched the damn thing, because it’s not at all interested in that. The question is how well the decision makers in Washington and on air bases and other US military facilities across the globe are prepared for a situation that should logically never arise. It’s not the biggest of spoilers to say that the intercepting capabilities fail; if that weren’t the case, there would be no film, as this would still be a stressful geopolitical incident but not a Defcon 1 situation. A major American city will be hit, this is unavoidable fact. How do those in the upper echelons of US government and the military deal with this fact, and how does it affect their decision making, that is the question A House of Dynamite asks. Especially because plunging the nation and the world into an all-out nuclear war also affects them personally: on a human level they are fathers, mothers, sons, daughters.

By having the same fateful twenty minutes from launch to impact play out thrice in virtual real time, with each iteration bringing us higher up on the decision-making totem pole, screenwriter Noah Oppenheim takes a decision that works both in favor of and against the film. We start on an army base in Alaska, where a military crew first notices the launch, and whose responsibility it is to launch ground-based ballistics to intercept any airborne threat that’s on a path to hit the United States. That sounds reassuring, but later in the film somebody compares it to shooting a bullet with a bullet. In other words, it’s a crapshoot. The incident triggers the White House Situation Room, where Senior Director Jason Clarke and Senior Duty Officer Rebecca Ferguson try to keep cool heads as they quickly organize a meeting between the highest military brass (mostly personified by Tracy Letts), the National Security Advisor (Gabriel Basso), the Defense Secretary (Jared Harris), and other assorted top advisors. Eventually the President of the United States (Idris Elba; the idea of two Brits running the US government is amusing, though probably without subversive intention) joins the call, with less than ten minutes to decide what to do.

As the final seconds count down to nuclear impact, Bigelow turns back the clock and focuses on some of the players we have only seen on Situation Room monitors so far, while also introducing new ones like National Intelligence Officer Greta Lee, who is visiting a Gettysburg reenactment with her son on her day off. We witness the decision-making process through their eyes, eyes that are on a higher level. As we again reach the moment of obliteration of millions of Americans, Bigelow repeats the process, but she now aims for the highest: the Defense Secretary and the President. We are now at a level where the decisions become almost impossible to make; what to do when you have the lives of tens of millions of people in your hands?

From a thematic point of view, A House of Dynamite‘s chosen structure works, as it makes clear that the higher the level, the more difficult the choices become, to the point where they really should not be the responsibility of a single person. On each of the levels the decision-making comes down to humans who are perhaps not always equipped to make them, certainly when they are personally affected by the situation; Harris’s character’s daughter lives in the city about to be hit, for instance. From a dramatic point of view though, this threefold structure works against the film. When we reach the moment of impact Bigelow cuts away, but that robs the audience of a climax, however disturbing, that never comes, in lieu of a repeat (twice, even) of the build-up. It’s the cinematic equivalent of ‘edging’ without the eventual release, which makes for a viewing experience that isn’t fully satisfying. Noah Oppenheim’s methodical and meticulously researched screenplay ratchets up the tension as much as it can, and Bigelow’s customary nervous hand-held camera work (courtesy of DP Barry Ackroyd) and Volker Bertelmann’s unnerving score ensure that this very procedural film stays engrossing and surprising despite repeating itself three times over, but in the back of the mind the lack of resolve keeps nagging.

This isn’t a nuclear disaster film though, and the choices are deliberate. Bigelow and Oppenheim’s intent is to inform and to warn: when the Cold War was at its height the nuclear threat was real and a constant worry, and even in the ’80s nuclear proliferation was a hot topic. But in the decades since, the urgency has ebbed away, and the idea that decisions made by a few can destroy human civilization as a whole is more or less taken for granted and accepted. Yet those few people are still just that: people, with human emotions and shortcomings. An added layer is the two-dimensional world in which these decisions are made: the film regularly returns to what is basically a Zoom meeting between the decision makers, but humans being reduced to just talking faces on a computer screen takes the humanity out of the humongous choices they have to make. In the end, A House of Dynamite‘s cerebral approach to the existence of nuclear weapons, and the way humanity doesn’t question it, lacks the dramatic power that Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty had, because while both films have at their heart very human decisions, withholding the consequences of those decisions shifts the focus to characters who are too thinly drawn for us to grow attached to them. By asking why we are living in a house full of dynamite in the first place, without actually lighting a match, the film adds to the very thing it urges against: indifference towards the dynamite. This renders it a film in which the structure helps underline its questions, but works against its dramatic impact.