Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘A House of Dynamite’ Is a Waking Nuclear Nightmare With No End

Tony Sokol

Doomsday will have to wait. Director Kathryn Bigelow sets up a nuclear scenario in “A House of Dynamite,” and forces fears to play out offscreen. Onscreen is a tense race to an undetermined end. During the run, the safety nets fail to catch the danger. This Netflix original is a horror feature without gore, and all the more frightening for it.

Beginning with 19 minutes to impact, the majority of the film takes place in the United States’ nuclear response control centers, situation rooms, and vehicles carrying officials en route to disaster planning. An agonized and exhausted POTUS, played by Idris Elba, is not seen until after the halfway point. By the time the president arrives, the audience is as briefed as Secretary of Defense Reid Baker (Jared Harris), Air Force General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts), and Admiral Mark Miller (Jason Clarke). Elba’s POTUS is fatigued but content entering the proceedings, and unravels with each impossible decision. As speedy as the briefings come, it is already too late.

Split into three chapters, screenwriter Noah Oppenheim begins each at the moment before a regular day becomes a nuclear nightmare. From the soldiers at a missile defense base in Fort Greely, AK, who first spot an unidentified launch, to each government and military responder, no one expects nor accepts the scenario. The full countdown begins again from a different perspective, tightly examining the players in each location, while expanding the information. This gets too predictable by the third rewind, when it finally moves forward.

As the director of military dramas like “Zero Dark Thirty,” and 2008’s Academy Award-winning “The Hurt Locker,” Bigelow is a stickler for authenticity. By maintaining a real-time feel, she expertly raises tension at an almost leisurely pace. When the first alert signal about an incoming ICBM comes in, the soldiers believe a country is conducting a test. They make small talk about last night’s baseball game, and that scrappy shortstop. By the time the missile is determined to make impact near Chicago, hardened professionals are apologizing over crumbs they spilled on desks.

No one is prepared. People get lost in personal concerns. Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) worries about her son, who kept her up all night with a fever. Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) calls to tell his mother he loves her before throwing up in the sand outside of a missile-defense base. Everyone does their job, and nothing is ever enough. The vulnerability is overwhelming. As the missile defense technology, which Baker calls “a coin toss,” fails, the humans on the job maintain enough composure to go through the steps, until some don’t. The most surprising exit is surprisingly understandable. Then the White House Situation Room declares Defcon 1.

“A House of Dynamite” gives subtle nods to nuclear war thrillers of the past. Like the president’s personal dilemma in Sidney Lumet’s 1964 classic “Fail-Safe,” Baker’s daughter lives in the city about to be destroyed. Like Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” Bigelow’s film follows all the instructions to the letter, but runs out of paper. The launch is called “insane” several times, as is the response, which Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) compares to “hitting a bullet with a bullet.” POTUS gets information from the Big Board.

Bigelow’s first movie in eight years is less of a political thriller than a disaster movie. The race to determine where the device originated from is less perilous than the flattening inclination of the warhead. The choice of whether to counterattack or stand down as Chicago is incinerated seems superfluous yet predetermined. The advisor on North Korea (Greta Lee) takes the call while watching a reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg. She had just commented about how many deaths occurred in the historic battle, unaware she controls the finger on a trigger to another. We first notice Lieutenant Commander Robert Reeves’ (Jonah Hauer-King) black case when he is sitting outside the Oval Office before POTUS celebrates athletics at a basketball camp for girls. The First Lady is saving endangered elephants on safari in Kenya, frustratingly unable to offer guidance. The case’s binder, titled “NUCLEAR DECISION HANDBOOK,” becomes an instrument of destruction, rather than a survival plan.

“A House of Dynamite” begs for a sequel that will never come. Anticlimactic is a polite term. The ending is a question mark more disconcerting than the one that ends the science fiction B-movie classic, “The Blob.” The danger is real in Bigelow’s film, and it is growing, quite probably out of control as the credits roll. There are no politics in this movie. We do not know whether the president is Republican or Democrat. Nuclear annihilation is scary enough.

“A House of Dynamite” begins streaming Oct. 24 on Netflix.