★★★½ (3½ out of 4)
I doubt any movie this year will do more to shatter your nerves and awaken your fears than “A House of Dynamite.” It’s a triumphant return, after seven years, for Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman to win an Oscar as best director for 2009’s “The Hurt Locker.” That alone makes it essential cinema. The other thing you should know upfront is that “A House of Dynamite” will only be in theaters for two weeks until its Oct. 24 streaming debut on Netflix. So get moving, people.
If you want “A House of Dynamite” to shake you to the core as Bigelow intended, see it in a packed theater with other white-knuckled viewers who’ll be perched on the edge of their seats. Bigelow grabs you from minute one and never lets go.
The basic setup in the script by Noah Oppenheim, the former head of NBC News, is this: a nuclear missile is headed for Chicago, but no one knows which world power launched it. If not intercepted, the missile will hit its target in 18 minutes. The film unfolds within that time frame, with events relayed from multiple points of view.
Don’t worry, the resetting doesn’t kill momentum; it intensifies it, as befitting the director of “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Detroit.” The film’s action is split into three sections, each focusing on a different set of individuals as they respond to the fact that a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific will most likely hit the city of Chicago and instantly incinerate around 10 million people.
I doubt any movie this year will do more to shatter your nerves and awaken your fears than 'A House of Dynamite.' It’s a triumphant return, after seven years, for Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow who grabs you from minute one and never lets go.
We begin ascending the chain of command by splitting our attention between a missile-defense battalion in Alaska led by Major David Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) and the White House Situation Room, where senior duty officer Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) must first identify the nuke before it can destroy it. Ferguson is expert at showing what it takes to hold to the ground while the ground keeps shifting.
In the second section, Bigelow takes us inside the U.S. Strategic Command, where no-nonsense general Anthony Brady (a superb Tracy Letts), flying high on the eight sugars he puts in his coffee, must plan for a coordinated attack on all enemies with nuclear weapons if a single attacker cannot be identified in time. Beneath the White House, deputy national security advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) tries to sweat out a more peaceful solution.
In the final section, we watch Secretary of Defense Reid Baker (a fine-grained Jared Harris) deal with the fact that there’s no time to save his estranged daughter in Chicago. Even POTUS, played with subtlety and quiet strength by Idris Elba, is stuck at a WNBA kids’ event with Angel Reese, while the world unravels. No matter that his retaliatory strategy advisor Robert Reeves (Jonah Hauer-King) can walk him through a book of nuclear codes, the decision to strike or stand down is all his.
Bigelow brilliantly orchestrates this enormous cast of characters over a huge world canvas and she does it at warp speed over a scant 112 minutes. She also runs her adrenaline rush of a movie into an abrupt ending that leaves nothing resolved. How could it? The reality is that 12,000 active nuclear warheads now exist across the storehouses of at least nine nations. That’s an uncomfortable truth that led Bigelow to say that her hope is that this film will “encourage conversation about reducing the nuclear stockpile. That would be the optimal outcome.”
Good luck with that. But glib nihilism is never a fallback for Bigelow. Her film is without closure but not without hope. Even in the face of Armageddon, she shows us characters striving to make a personal connection, however slight. That’s exactly what Bigelow does as the animating force behind “A House of Dynamite.” The house she has built for our attention is scary as hell, but in whatever remains of it, humanity still has a future.