Kathryn Bigelow has reopened the subject that we all tacitly agree not to discuss or imagine, in the movies or anywhere else: the subject of an actual nuclear strike. It’s the subject which tests narrative forms and thinkability levels.
Maybe this is why we prefer to see it as something for absurdism and satire – a way of not staring into the sun – to remember Kubrick’s (brilliant) black comedy Dr Strangelove, with no fighting in the war room etc, rather than Lumet’s deadly serious Fail Safe.
Bigelow, with screenwriter Noah Oppenheim, broaches one of the most frightening thoughts of all: that a nuclear war could or rather will start with no one knowing who started it or who ended it. I watched this film with translucently white knuckles but also that strange climbing nausea that only this topic can create.
Kyle Allen as Capt Jon Zimmer in A House of Dynamite Photograph: Eros Hoagland/Netflix
The drama is recounted in one 18-minute segment, repeated from various standpoints and various locations: 18 minutes being the time estimated to elapse between military observers reporting the out-of-the-blue launch of a nuke from the Pacific and its projected 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) featuring military and civilian personnel in banks of desks, generally in a shallow horseshoe shape facing a very big screen flashing up the threat level from Defcon 2 to Defcon 1 and also showing a large map displaying the missile’s current position, which is occasionally replaced with what amounts to a Zoom mosaic of tense faces belonging to high-ranking officials with no idea what to do, dialling in chaotically from their smartphones.
Rebecca Ferguson plays intelligence analyst Capt Olivia Walker, Tracy Letts is the gung ho military chief Gen Anthony Brady – this drama’s equivalent of the cold war’s Gen Curtis LeMay – who advocates an immediate pre-emptive counterstrike before the incoming missile arrives, Jared Harris is the defense secretary Reid Baker who realises that his estranged daughter is in Chicago, Gabriel Basso plays the brilliant and flustered young NSA adviser Jake Baerington who, if this was an Aaron Sorkin script, could be relied on to save the day.
Gabriel Basso as Jake Baerington in A House of Dynamite. Photograph: Eros Hoagland/Netflix
Jonah Hauer-King plays the thin-faced, priestly naval officer Lt Cmdr Robert Reeves who accompanies the president at all times with a ring-bound folder with the nuclear strike options and authorisation codes. Idris Elba plays the president himself, who, like George W Bush finding out about 9/11 at an infants’ school, gets the news about the missile while cheerfully demonstrating basketball shots in front of high-schoolers.
Frantically, the White House staff try to intercept the missile, and in the event of failure, must decide if they should not respond in kind, effectively sacrifice an American city with millions of lives and risk appeasing the aggressor or launch a retaliation and risk world war three – or even gamble that the missile will not detonate. And they can’t decide if this is a rogue launch from the North Koreans or another nuclear power, born of a fanatical desperation that no one has guessed at. 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 movie has the classic personae from what might be called the nuclear apocalypse film: the careworn, grey-haired officials who always guessed it might come to this; the smart, hard-working younger staff doing their loyal, patriotic best, the utterly unreflective young bomber pilots entrusted with delivering the final blow. And all with the sculpted or painted faces of Ike and Lincoln in the White House looking impassively down.
A House of Dynamite. Photograph: Eros Hoagland/Netflix
What the film shrewdly shows is the horribly ironic transitional moments: along with the heart-stopping intel about the missile, the screens are, at first, still showing ordinary news – headlines such as “Rental demand driving up prices”, now remnants of a lost world.
There are times when A House of Dynamite might seem melodramatic or stagey and yet maybe that is how it may well feel in the highest reaches of power – with everyone looking and feeling like actors in elaborate costumes whose roles had only one purpose: to deter aggression, a purpose which is now obsolete. It is a big chill.