Now and then it occurs to me that the future of my very existence, as well as that of the rest of our global population, lies in the hands of complete strangers. People I will never meet – let alone know their values, temperament, or rationale. Our combined fates in the wake of war, especially where nuclear weapons are concerned, teeter in the balance of strategy and protocol. As a veteran of the political thriller genre, it comes as no surprise that Kathryn Bigelow has experienced some degree of engrossment in the same matter, illustrated by the events that unfold within her latest stirring and palpitation-inducing project, A House of Dynamite.
On what otherwise seems a perfectly normal morning, US radar picks up on a singular airborne missile. Without being able to identify a definitive launch site, responsibility for the weapon in flight (and the intention behind it) remain a mystery, leaving multiple teams of government officials scrambling for certainty and answers. Once a blast radius becomes concise, targeting one of the United States’ most densely populated cities, a 19-minute countdown begins to tick away. In the wake of the predicted impact, the President (Idris Elba) is presented with two equally complex options: wait out the detonation and risk losing millions of people, as well as become exposed as a vulnerable target if the warhead is bona fide, or blindly retaliate and gamble the world being plunged into nuclear warfare.
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The structure of the film operates in the manner of a pressure cooker. Playing out a preliminary chain of events that is reprised several times from the beginning of the countdown, detailing more personal perspectives of various ranking members within the chain of command. As each subsection gains steam, the film rises to full intensity before letting the pressure regulate, and so goes the cycle. The unconventional momentum keeps things fresh without overstuffing the narrative with too many moving parts at any one given time.
Films that center around crises threatening national security have a habit of portraying the individuals responsible for aiding the decision-making process as monotonous and largely unsympathetic, which will generally have some level of truth to it. However, the combined forces of Kathryn Bigelow’s realistic gritty direction and Oppenheim’s skillfully layered script yield an outlook that takes these high-ranking officials and renders them equals with the people they are obliged to protect. Glimmers of compassion and trepidation bubble to the surface as the circumstances grow increasingly dire. In performances that are both occasionally charming and always commanding, Rebecca Ferguson and Idris Elba spearhead an impressive ensemble.
For the most part, the masses remain blissfully unaware of the life-threatening event unfolding behind closed doors for the entirety of the film’s perfectly judged runtime. Tacitly, the story ponders the limits of just how oblivious the everyday citizen is rendered, and how our world could be turned upside down in the course of minutes by decisions made by a handful of people. A House of Dynamite truly earns the emotional turmoil it conjures by virtue of thoroughness, tangible research, and a profound understanding that the equilibrium of our planet’s relative peace is alarmingly fragile.