Candidate Athryn Bigelow has opened up this subject that we all tacitly agree not to discuss and imagine, in films or anywhere else: the subject of an actual nuclear device. It is a subject that tests the form and level of narrative thought. Perhaps that is why we prefer to think of it as something of absurdism and satire – a way of not looking at the sun – recalling Kubrick’s (brilliant) black comedy Dr. Strangelove, the no-fight war in space, etc., rather than Lumet’s deadly serious failures.
Bigelow, with screenwriter Noah Oppenheim, is fascinated by one of the most terrifying thoughts of all: that a nuclear war could, or rather would, begin with no one knowing who started it or who ended it. I watched this film with translucent white knuckles, but also with the strange climbing nausea that only this subject can induce.
The drama is told in a single 18-minute segment, repeated from different points of view and different locations: 18 minutes is the time estimated between military observers reporting the launch of the blue nuke from the Pacific Ocean and its predicted arrival in Chicago.
The action plays out in a series of situation rooms and command and control suites with acronyms like PEOC (Presidential Emergency Operations Center), which feature military and civilian personnel at a bank of tables, usually in a shallow horseshoe shape, facing a very large screen flashing with threat levels from Defcon 2 to Defcon 1, and also large maps showing the current position of the missile, which has sometimes been replaced with what is shown to get thousands, which has variously been replaced with what is supposed to get thousands. Belonging to high-ranking officials who have no idea what to do, chaotically dialing from their smartphones.
Rebecca Ferguson plays intelligence analyst Capt. Olivia Walker, while Tracy Letts is the gung-ho military boss Gen. Anthony Brady—this drama’s equivalent of Cold War Gen. Curtis LeMay—who advocates for an immediate counter-measure before his estranged wife, who is in his estranged state, is captured and is shown to be a work of art. She plays the brilliant and flashy new NSA advisor Jake Barington, who, if this were an Aaron Sorkin script, could be relied upon to save the day.
Jon Hauer-King plays the thin-faced, priestly Navy officer Lt. Cmdr Robert Reeves, who accompanies the president at all times with a ring binder of nuclear capabilities and authorization codes. Idris Elba plays the president himself, who, like George W. Bush, learns about 9/11 at a nursery school, receives news of the missile while cheerfully demonstrating basketball shots in front of the high school students.
The White House staff is desperately trying to intercept the missile, and if it fails, they must decide whether they should not respond in kind, effectively sacrificing an American city with millions of lives and risking it to stop the aggressor, or launch a retaliation and risk World War III — or even gamble that the missile won’t detonate. And they can’t decide whether it’s a rogue discovery by the North Koreans or another nuclear power born of fanatical desperation that no one has guessed. This unknowing, this chaos operating outside the long-understood tradition of mutually assured destruction between two sides, is what the film suggests will be the origin of a new war.
Bigelow’s film has the classic cast of what might be called a nuclear apocalypse movie: the well-groomed, gray-haired officials who always guessed it might come to this; the smart, hard-working younger staff doing their loyal, patriotic best; the completely unthinking young bomber pilots entrusted with delivering the final blow. And everyone with the sculpted or painted faces of Ike and Lincoln in the White House staring dispassionately down.
What the film does strike is the awfully ironic moments of transition: along with the heart-stopping intel about the missile, the screens at the beginning still show the usual news-headlines like “rent demand driving up prices,” remnants of a now-lost world.
There are times when House of Dynamite might seem melodramatic or stagey, and yet maybe that’s how it can feel good at the height of power – with everyone looking and feeling like actors in elaborate costumes whose roles had only one purpose: to deter aggression that’s now obsolete. It’s a big chill.
