Flasz On Film

 

After Detroit, Kathryn Bigelow’s last directorial outing, the first woman to ever win The Academy Award for Film Direction looked as though she was going to take a break. Sure, having climbed to the top of the world it is only natural to want to sit down for a second and take in the view, but Bigelow—not unlike other highly self-driven storytellers—used the top of the world as a vantage point from which to spot other summits to climb next.  

Between Triple Frontier, a movie she was co-developing with Mark Boal and which ended up directed eventually by J.C. Chandor, the Mogadishu, Minnesota TV series and an adaptation of David Koepp’s post-apocalyptic novel titled Aurora, Bigelow stayed busy. Unfortunately—and I do mean it in every sense of the word as I would have loved to see all of her unrealized projects come to fruition—they all fell through. What they did illuminate, however, was the fact that her interests remained largely unchanged since The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty and Detroit. Bigelow’s pursuit of telling engrossing stories that are as urgent as they are sobering continued unabated.  

And what’s more urgent than the idea of reminding us all of just how brittle and precarious our existence on this planet truly is? We are currently bombarded by news items relating to the rise of AI, the impending industrial revolution, adoption of automation displacing jobs, and the frightening prospect of an artificial super-intelligence emerging eventually and threatening our continued survival. Not to mention the slowly encroaching global climate crisis and the progressively disintegrating international co-operation between nation states. We have completely forgotten about the inescapable reality that the humankind still lives with the barrel of a gun pressed against its temple.  

Ever since the Cold War came to a close with the dissolution of The Soviet Union, we’ve grown progressively distant from the fact that the two major nuclear powers, USA and Russia, flanked with their allied states have never truly stepped away from the brink. The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction continues to keep the prospect of global nuclear Armageddon at arm’s length; a multilateral agreement ensuring that in case one of the states ever pressed the button, everything we have ever known and loved would permanently cease to exist. There would be no prospect of de-escalation. The threat of the world coming to an end is the very thing that keeps the world from ending. And because all the major players (at least until President Putin decided to rattle his sabre a few years ago) have adjusted their nuclear postures and holstered their thermonuclear Glocks, we’ve been tacitly permitted to forget that the finger was still resting gently on the trigger. That continued threat of global annihilation ended up in humanity’s blind spot. But it is still, nonetheless, there.  

Much like the 1964 Fail-Safe directed by Sidney Lumet and the recent chilling work of speculative fiction from Annie Jacobsen titled Nuclear War: A Scenario, Kathryn Bigelow’s newest film A House of Dynamite is here to serve as a sobering reminder that this thermonuclear Glock is still here, whether we’re aware of its existence or not. However, in contrast to Lumet whose work directly responded to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the film written by Noah Oppenheim borrows a page from Annie Jacobsen instead, either because it draws direct inspiration from her book or because it is based on the same factual research the filmmakers conducted on their own accord. It crafts a hypothetical scenario where a single unattributed missile aimed at one of the major American cities is detected by radars. Nobody knows who fired it or why they did so. It’s a rogue act of aggression, a bolt out of the blue; a scenario most feared by researchers in the field and arguably most likely to come to pass in the current political climate. A completely unpredictable and unprovoked act of aggression. The end result remains the same, though: total annihilation of the humankind unfolding in the course of one morning. 

Bigelow’s movie presents this scenario mostly in real time, with some suspense-generating temporal dilation interspersed here and there. A House of Dynamite traces what happens during the fateful twenty-or-so minutes that it takes for an intercontinental ballistic missile carrying a thermonuclear payload to reach its final destination from a number of angles. We see this story play out as seen by people working at the White House Situation Room, soldiers whose job it is to attempt to intercept the missile using sophisticated-yet-fallible technology, various government advisors and military commanders (Tracy Letts perfectly embodies a hawkish-yet-sober general), and the American president (Idris Elba) as well.  

In this movie, there is zero time for fluff, setup and backstories, just as there would be no run-up or foreshadowing to the real end of the world. Bigelow, with her signature precision and relentless urgency, gives her characters just about enough breathing space to establish them as humans with lives, responsibilities and families to care for. She allows precious few seconds for one of the Situation Room chiefs (Rebecca Ferguson) to get in touch with her husband and instruct him to seek shelter, the Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris) to reach out to his estranged daughter, and the president to seek brief reprieve from what’s about to happen by exchanging words with his wife.  

Other than that, there is no space for anything else but cold reality of a countdown to Armageddon where very many people must follow arcane protocol that they have drilled many times while being completely certain they would never need to enact in anger and where the most difficult decisions must be made in the absence of factual evidence. Bigelow ruthlessly outlines just how quickly people’s lives are reduced to choices they have to make within the next sixty seconds and how there’s no room to pause or evaluate in the cold light of day any of the nuances of these decisions. Elba’s president is handed a book with all his options, and neither of them seems right. They all presumably lead to the end of the world. His advisor in the film refers to his options as rare, medium and well-done, as though to appeal to his commander’s imagination while he would be making his choices. But the reality remains that regardless of the option, the steak is going to be cooked. And the cow is long dead and butchered. It’s only a question of heat intensity and time on the grill.  

The chilling severity of the scenario in which the world is about to end at the end of a twenty-minute timer is something Kathryn Bigelow is particularly well-equipped to convey. A House of Dynamite is a movie you will watch with your heart right up in your throat and you might even discover that your limbs will grow ice-cold as the movie unfolds. It’s an exercise in sustained high-pitch anxiety that puts the human body in a state of temporary shock because of how visceral and immediate it is. And that’s no small feat. It’s a work of storytelling genius, aptitude in direction and a masterclass in filmmaking craftsmanship exactly of the kind you ought to associate with Bigelow’s earlier work.  

It is also an example of stunning cinematic bravery as not every movie would have the courage to sidestep the siren call to offer the viewer even the thinnest glimpse at the aftermath of the catastrophe to which this entire movie is a runway. In Fail-Safe, we witness the fallout of bone-chilling decisions made by the president played by Henry Fonda. Annie Jacobsen in her sobering novel includes a hypothetical description of the hours, days, weeks, months and years following a massive nuclear exchange between all major states triggered by a single rogue missile launched by North Korea.  

Bigelow and Oppenheim choose not to. You might say they leave us wanting a resolution. But we all know what the outcome is. It takes a confident filmmaker to decide not to visualize the apocalypse and instead leave it to the viewer’s imagination. That’s a way more horrifying prospect and hopefully one that’s more likely to leave a lasting impression on those who choose to give A House of Dynamite a chance. And they should, mostly because of this film’s urgency and timeliness. After all, the world has been slowly inching towards a conflict between major global powers for years now and we definitely need a reminder of what’s at stake here.

Other than that, this movie deserves to be watched for another, simpler, much more mundane reason in comparison: simply because it’s a phenomenal thriller. One of the best to have come out this year. Competently written and exceptionally directed. A perfectly packaged psychological rollercoaster, as traumatizing as it is evocative. Above all, it’s a fiery beacon signifying that the Queen of Action Movies has returned to claim her throne.