By skyforbes Bigelow’s Netflix white-knuckle thriller mines our worst fears in an immersive epic which succumbs to melodrama
How blessed we mortal beings are to live each of our lives with the awareness that we might wake up tomorrow to discover that, finally, it has happened: global warming has advanced to an irreparable point of no return and life as we know it, in the coming years, will never be the same again; a deadly new virus is raging its way across the globe, which, thanks to antibiotic resistance, threatens to wipe us out; or, to keep things topical, artificial intelligence has far surpassed levels of human intelligence to become supreme ruler of the world, making us its humble subjects (or eradicating us altogether).
In the case of Kartherine Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, her first picture for the streaming giant Netflix, it is the ultimate “what if”: nuclear war. Of all the man-made threats to the human race, nuclear obliteration is perhaps the first that springs to mind thanks to the popular trope of some Bond-style villain gleefully pressing down on the Big Red Button (in reality, as AHOD shows, it is a little more complex).
And it’s an act of destruction on a scale matched only by the arrival of an asteroid large enough to uproot the world’s entire ecosystem. One such asteroid ended the Mesozoic era 66 million years ago, landing in the coast of Mexico and killing all dinosaurs (bar the winged variety), ultimately paving the way for the Anthropocene — the human era — millions of years later. We’re gently reminded of this when Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) — senior duty officer for the White House Situation Room (WHSR) — finds her son’s tiny dinosaur figurine in the pocket of her ice-blue blazer. Placing it fondly on the desk before her, it’s a powerful memento mori expressing not only the self-inflicted fragility of all mankind on planet Earth but also, by way of it being a children’s toy, the legacy of destruction each generation has bequeathed the next perhaps since the invention of gunpowder.
She does this having mere minutes ago learnt of the speedily encroaching impact of an intercontinental ballistic missile (or ICBM) due to arrive in the vicinity of Chicago, Illinois. Around fifteen minutes prior, however, she was one of many government officials in the first line of protocol for such issues of defence, going about her morning having just relieved the night duty and getting up to speed on latest events (among which include unusual quiet from North Vietnam).
Walker and her team initially receive the news of a foreign object traversing space with as little worry as her peers at Fort Greely, Alaska — a military base responsible for detecting incoming threats. Presumed to be a routine North Korean missile test, it is investigated and monitored with the efficiency of a well-oiled team. However, when the news arrives from Fort Greely that the missile has a suborbital trajectory and will land in the US in approximately 20 minutes, this changes. A ripple of tension is felt across all departments involved, quickly overrided, however, by preparations for the next phase of protocol: neutralising the warhead before it can arrive. Vague attempts at remaining calm are made by senior officials, with Walker and her senior Admiral Mark Miller (Jason Clarke) reminding the WHSR team to remain focused, that the ground-based interceptor missiles launched from Alaska will vaporise the warhead.
When they fail to do so, the situation turns code black; the ripple of panic felt earlier is dwarfed by a tidal wave of existential collapse. In the WHSR, as at Fort Greely, protocol breaks away altogether, and the colour-coded manuals they abide by — learned back-to-front through rote training — are rendered meaningless, intelligible. How to process something so banal as protocol faced with humanity’s worst nightmare (second maybe to the arrival of a meteorite capable of wiping us all out)?
This is a question Bigelow poses from many different vantage points, rewinding the clock back 20 minutes to recount the same story from a total of three separate but intertwining groups — plunging us into the worlds of each only to rip us out 30–40 minutes or so later (the film isn’t edited to reflect real time).
With each rewind, we rise up through the ranks to include National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso), Secretary of Defense Reid Baker (Jared Harris), Combatant Commander Anthony Brady of STRATCOM (Tracy Letts) and, finally, the President himself (played by a largely invisible Idris Elba, patched in over the phone with no camera). Other, more dispersed figures tangentially related to the crisis are also involved, with journalists employed at the White House, FEMA staff and members of the United States Airforce dropping in and out of the picture.
The three main narratives are mediated through the ongoing conference call, and viewers work hard to keep up with the growing crescendo of disembodied voices and frantic activity as the situation worsens. This is where the movie’s strengths lie. The skilled Kirk Baxtor splices countless scenes together — often blink-and-you’ll-miss-it in length — painstakingly spinning the chaos into a complex spiderweb of a film with the call at its core. It’s especially satisfying to witnessing snippets of conversation — varying from mundane comments about messy desks to make-or-break musings on the fate of America — echoe across each rewind, heard from different vantage points to take on nuanced meanings.
The snippet of dialogue that resonates most is the morsel of conversation between Commander Brady and the President. Faced with the largest geopolitical quagmire in the history of the human race — surrender or prepare to retaliate — all the beleaguered President can do is declare the situation “insanity.” The response from the matter-of-fact Commander and acting mediator of the crisis: “No sir, this is reality.”
It’s the simplicity of the exchange — like few others in the film — that drives home the absurdity of modern geopolitics, the cognitive dissonance between the knowledge that the world’s leading powers possess nuclear weapons and genuinely understanding that they could, at any given moment, choose to end the world.
The script as a whole is far from being consistently impactful, however. Often, the film’s propulsive realism is hampered with clumsy and unnatural dialogue: Jared Harris’ Secretary of Defence Reid Baker, for instance, failing to reach his Chicago-based daughter to instruct her to find safety, moans, as though any other day, “Oh, don’t go to voicemail…”. Elba’s turn as the largely unseen role as the President, meanwhile, gets the award for most inane, pseudo-philosophical musings (“Reminds me of when I was in college” he quips, out of nowhere, retrieving his list of “Gold Codes” from his pocket that will determine the fate of America during an emergency flight to the country’s underground nuclear bunker).
More often than not, this hammy sort of dialogue is the byproduct of the film’s efforts to add backstory to a large ensemble of characters we ultimately don’t stay with long enough to warrant. Regardless, in a bid to raise the stakes even further, Bigelow insists on segueing into the lives of partners, spouses and children, spreading the film out to the consistency of clingfilm.
The tension of AHOD emanates not from the peril of pregnant wives or daughters in Chicago, but the white-hot drama involved in saving America, and the world, from nuclear obliteration. It doesn’t need stating the film’s characters have families or partners to think about — this can be artfully inferred. Take the toy dinosaur Walker places on her desk early in the movie, which alone provides enough background of her home life; how much more effective would it have been to witness her do this without having seen her partner and child, whom we meet briefly in the film’s opening, at all?
As with the best thrillers, less is more — an adage Bigelow seems to have forgotten. Volker Berkelmann’s galling score, while virtually indistinguishable from his work on Edward Berger’s Conclave, is needlessly hysterical — a minimalist soundscape of wiry, electrical drone sounds would have worked beautifully. And there are, as we hurtle through the film’s final act, far too many characters vying for attention in what feels like a who’s-who of upcoming Netflix talent (who, with so little to go off, deliver some shaky performances).
I wonder if instead of striving to incorporate the perspectives of around 20 or so characters as the film does, concentrating its efforts on the storylines of a select few characters (Ferguson’s Walker, Harris’ Baker and Moses Ingram’s underused FEMA official Cathy Rogers, say) would have better captured the visceral, human tension the approach of a nuclear warhead would elicit. A trick was missed, moreover, in not using the stripped-back brilliance of real-time, single-take camera format to really help drive home the immersive sense of ‘being there’ Bigelow usually does well (though this might have necessitated more rewinds given that the ICBM’s trajectory is just 20 minutes while the film’s runtime clocks 2 hours).
And yet kudos to Bigelow, who here lives up to her name as one of very few filmmakers brave enough to ask humanity’s most difficult questions while refusing the Hollywoodised narratives we’re used to. AHOD isn’t about the outcome of a nuclear warhead, nor quixotic fantasies of saving the day just in the nick of time. It’s about those critical moments before impact. It’s about the irony that in the face of such imminent destruction, the decision of how to retaliate, if at all, must be made. It’s about asking what it must be like as a living, human being faced with the prospect of the end of the world.
Bigelow answers the first two questions more successfully than she does this latter one. Even so, she scores the strange paradox at the heart of what it is to be human today: watching teams of brilliantly skilled people operate hugely sophisticated technology built with a level of human ingenuity like that which goes into manufacturing an ICMB itself. I’d call it insanity, but, as Letts’ Combatant Brady would remind us: it’s reality.