Movie Review: Nuclear nightmares in Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘House of Dynamite’

When in the process of relaunching your directing career, sometimes the best method is to go back to basics, which is essentially what Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite has done this month.

Her first release since Detroit (2017) nearly a decade ago doesn’t go all the way back to her genre roots a la Near Dark (1987) or Point Break (1991) as many of her fans would like her to do, it does bring her back to the familiar territory that took her to Oscar glory with The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012).

A House of Dynamite has a very basic, simple plot structure that is practically an excuse to remind movie viewers that this directing veteran has still got it.

In a matter of just 18 minutes, we see how the U.S. government and military act when a rogue nuclear missile is spotted and flying directly at Chicago. Situation Room Officer Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos), Admiral Mark Miller (Jason Clarke), General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts) and the POTUS himself (Idris Elba) are some of the professionals frantically hurrying to agree on what the best strategy is to block the attack.

A House of Dynamite is written by Noah Oppenheim and has one of the best casts of on-screen talent this year, including Greta Lee, Jared Harris, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Willa Fitzgerald, Kyle Allen and Kaitlyn Dever. On a purely technical level, Bigelow delivers a finely tuned suspense thriller that she’s already proven she can direct in her sleep. The tone, acting, editing, pacing and staging are tight as basically a modernization of Sidney Lumet’s classic Fail-Safe (1964).

If there’s any reason for the lukewarm response to the new film, it’s not so much because of the “propaganda” accusations Bigelow received from some a decade ago because of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. It’s more because there isn’t really much of a theme other than “nuclear weapons are really scary.”

We don’t even get a real answer to where the missile is coming from. The characters theorize China, Russia, North Korea or an independent source, a glitch in the system or a false alarm. The film portrays every single person working for the country with the best intentions, making the movie feel like a modern fantasy, but also terrifying because of its subject.

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone in the White House was so completely competent? I like to think so, and so do the creators of A House of Dynamite. But this then leads to the biggest complaint from viewers: the ending.

Since this is Fail-Safe all over, there isn’t a happy ending here, and while that can be effective and appropriate, the final result lands more like an afterthought than a message.