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**/**** starring Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris written by Noah Oppenheim directed by Kathryn Bigelow
by Walter Chaw Stanley Kubrick tried to tell the story of Dr. Strangelove straight until he realized how funny the end of the world is, especially as it will inevitably be ushered in by the stupidest people on the planet. See, playing a game where the only winning move is not to play defines its contestants as idiots. Indeed, there’s an essential hilarity, a baked-in hyperbolic overreaction, to just the idea of a nuclear apocalypse that makes it surprisingly difficult to frame the premise as serious drama. The movie that might come closest is Roger Donaldson’s Thirteen Days, but only in its DVD incarnation under the short-lived “infinifilm” imprimatur, which branched to extracurricular documentary or archival materials that made watching the film very much like attending an entertaining and informative seminar on the Cuban Missile Crisis. By itself, it’s light in the britches: a Kennedy-impersonation contest with a stolid Kevin Costner along for the ride. Yes, the made-for-television movies The Day After, The War Game, Threads, and Testament are uniformly excellent, but they’re focused on the aftermath of nuclear apocalypse. Ditto the not-made-for-TV When the Wind Blows, The Quiet Earth, and On the Beach.
The most lauded, most revered “straight” looming-nuclear-war flick, Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe, is, for all its pedigree, dramatically moribund, so stiff and formal that by its end, I was rooting for the Bomb to hurry up for fuck’s sake. (The George Clooney remake for live television suffers from the same terminal malaise, while the HBO movie By Dawn’s Early Light is Fail Safe by any other name.) Crimson Tide is a terse two-hander with nuclear war as the MacGuffin, but for me, and this could be a product of my age, the best “impending nuclear war” films are John Badham’s WarGames and Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile. Both make their nuclear attacks alleged, centring on the absurdity of mutually assured destruction as experienced by two unreliable and love-drunk dorks. That’s right: it’s not certain that a real attack is on the way in either of those films. Maybe the widespread panic, the frantic alarm, is merely a metaphor for puberty. Maybe malfunctioning relays are crying electronic wolf in the last years of the Cold War. They’re funny, see, if only morbidly: the darkest of comedies at play with the coldest, most nihilistic of ironies.
This preamble is to say that Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite is a humourless (and “rote,” I’m tempted to say) slog told in triplicate from three different levels of gaffed, incompetent, understaffed, and ineffectual leadership during a crisis in which a mysterious nuclear missile fired from Somewhere makes its way unabated to Chicago. Don’t mistake this for an overt critique of our current clown car of moron fascists and fundamentalists. Instead, it’s a more all-encompassing observation of how ill-equipped we’ve always been as a species to deal with the consequences of our technologies. Bigelow is a serious artist whose work boasts a throughline of technology-as-Frankenstein’s-monster going as far back as Blue Steel (1990), if one were to include guns on the list of ideas humans had that immediately got away from them. A House of Dynamite makes sense as a Bigelow film, in other words. It even has a strong female protagonist–initially, at least–in NORAD suit Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), who exudes competence from every sculpted plane of her perfect Swedish face. I say “NORAD,” though I don’t actually know where she’s based beyond that it looks like the set of WarGames. Doesn’t matter. Olivia tries to calm her underlings, manages up where necessary, and watches with creased brow as various physical deterrents fail. Wait–is she at the White House? Doesn’t matter. The missile’s impact–and there’s never a question there’s a missile as opposed to some digital ghost (which is the first question I would ask, honestly)–is the “Quantum Leap” trigger to retell the timeline of Walker’s story from two additional perspectives.
The first belongs to General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts). From his seat at STRATCOM, he’s the Buck Turgidson of A House of Dynamite, advocating for a broad retaliation against every single country the United States counts as an enemy, just because one should strike while the iron’s hot. I did think about how enemy countries now include Canada and Ireland and probably Greenland and the Netherlands; we’re so deeply fucked and deserve every bird that comes home to roost–which is again not a thought A House of Dynamite has, meaning that Noah Oppenheim’s script feels musty rather than ripped from the headlines. It does manage, however, to shoehorn in suspicion that the perpetrator is North Korea. (Like dessert, there’s always room for casual fuck-off racism.) It occurs to me that the only reason no one’s blown us off the map yet is because a narcissist child’s response will be to launch the entire arsenal in order to turn the planet into a charcoal briquette out of pique to preserve the most fragile of fragile masculinities.
Finally, we check in with the President (Idris Elba), a bumbling jackass who inspires no confidence in our prospects with or without nuclear annihilation, so might as well push that button, big boy. This last section is the weakest. A general rule of thumb is to end on the mic drop, which is not, as it happens, the same as lurching around for a few minutes before accidentally dropping the mic. I’m with Arnie’s philosophical Terminator 2 T-800 when it comes to the prospects for the human race: “It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves.” For sure. Alas, Oppenheim’s script is no more subtle than the one Bigelow’s ex-husband James Cameron wrote. Meaning the bulk of the picture features sub-“The West Wing”, pseudo-smart politi-banter that includes, among other things, an exchange in which someone recriminates the President for saying, “This is insanity!” “No,” General Brady deadpans, “it’s reality.” Get over yourself, man.
A House of Dynamite has the whole world as its big blind, and yet it feels like there aren’t any stakes at all. How can there be no gravity to a film about the end of everything? Is it because I have no hope left that the people in charge of this world give a pluperfect fuck about the people they are ostensibly in charge of? We will be hoarding wealth until fire washes over us, printing our greedy, insane shadows on the rubble like a perverse rebus telling the tale of a species of clever, shaved apes who knew they were doomed but who, in the end, for every lie of civilization they told themselves, were ultimately only capable of being violent, self-interested primates. At some point, the Fallout games will be documentaries and blueprints for survival. Me? I’m voting for Rogue Comet in the election we will not be having in 2028. Goodnight stars. Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.
