Before even the Netflix studio logo rolls in Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite,” the screen emits a guttural rumble from Volker Bertelmann’s score. The score establishes a sense of dread that predates the unraveling of any events in this tick-tock political thriller. It replicates the consistent feeling of preemptive paranoia that envelops the chain of command around making a nuclear strike. It also embodies the low-grade panic likely to stay with the audience long after the credits roll.
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It starts as a day like any other: various U.S. military and government officials clock in to their workplaces and monitor national security across a patchwork of screens. A blip on the radar emerges, initially causing minimal concern. Besides, the country’s national defense apparatus has playbooks ready to standardize a course of action to minimize any airborne missile threats.
Bigelow plunges viewers directly into the room where it happens as the inbound missile continues barreling toward the continental United States and evades the military’s Ground-Based Interceptor (GBI). She’s not reinventing her much-imitated aesthetic of jittery zooms and shifty pans, developed with cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, to bring a sense of verité volatility to the proceedings. Bigelow has already perfected this style, demonstrating her complete mastery of ratcheting tension through the form in “A House of Dynamite.”
Giving the viewer an invisible position in the frame is about where her accommodation ends. The film moves at the pace of the escalating security situation, which requires the various principals involved in the high-stakes deliberations to speak in a jargon full of acronyms. (Fear not, text graphics on the screen help break those down.) The scenarios of Noah Oppenheim’s script play out with rapid-fire naturalistic dialogue exchanges, prioritizing adding veracity to the imagined crisis over hand-holding the audience. The experience of the film is like watching a documentary based on your worst nightmare.
The players involved in the decision-making process extend all the way up to the President (Idris Elba) as various agencies attempt to pinpoint the attack’s origin and prepare for potential defensive retaliation. Yet even as the missile’s continued trajectory opens up additional complications and brings in a host of assorted players, “A House of Dynamite” maintains a taut simplicity throughout. Editor Kirk Baxter, an Oscar-winning collaborator of David Fincher’s, efficiently balances an ensemble cast spread across multiple locations. Through all the layers of noise and action, the object of focus and the progression of the events always remain abundantly clear.
Bigelow’s formal control over the material belies the uncertainty that provides the reason for “A House of Dynamite” to exist. The enterprise of her film is a well-oiled machine that can safely marshal all its resources and manpower toward a desired outcome. The subject of her film is a creaky, unproven system of strategic maneuvers that were not truly designed for deployment. The breakdowns stemming from botched execution, like a missile getting past the GBIs, are scary. The realization of how ill-equipped the arrangement is to handle irrational actors is the stuff of existential crisis.
Oppenheim’s script deepens that burgeoning pit of terror with its sequencing of events and information. The film seems complete as it establishes a timeline up until the point of the potential missile strike. He introduces all the key players, even briefly or just in voiceover, as well as the choices to avert or respond to the attack. At what appears to be a boiling point for “A House of Dynamite,” the film doubles back on itself to reveal a more intricate structure than a purely chronological recounting. It’s a series of stacked nesting dolls that reinterpret seemingly understood evaluations of a scene to introduce further complications.
He starts with lower-level functionaries executing the rote pieces of the plan, such as Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) in the Situation Room and Major Daniel Gonzales (Anthony Ramos) on a military base in Alaska. He then widens the scope of situational analysis to more senior departmental leaders, like Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) and STRATCOM Commander General Anthony Brady (Tracey Letts), who layer on concerns for the geopolitical fallout of what happens after impact. Finally, the buck stops with the President and Secretary of Defense Reid Baker (Jared Harris), who factor in their political instincts to the burden of gambling millions of lives.
Oppenheim defines all these crucial players as more than just a title or pre-determined role. They all have some specific, personal tie swaying them away from level-headed rationality when making necessary decisions. The world is not governed by machines, as “A House of Dynamite” painstakingly showcases across all its frenzied operations. It’s run by humans. Bigelow’s film pinpoints a terrifying tragedy lurking unspoken in today’s world order: whether citizens place their trust in people or procedures, neither can be counted on to prevent mass destruction. [A-]
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