If the distinction between a “film” and a “movie” still means anything, then the first six days of the Venice Film Festival have most definitely given us films. “A House of Dynamite,” on the other hand, is a movie — or, more to the point, a Netflix movie, though even Netflix sometimes makes films (like the ones they have in this year’s festival, “Frankenstein” and “Jay Kelly”). But “A House of Dynamite,” a countdown-to-nuclear-disaster thriller directed by Kathryn Bigelow, is jacked up with so many familiar MOR tropes that even though it’s trying to be realistic about what it shows you (spoiler alert: It doesn’t really succeed), it still has the feel of a self-consciously jittery high-end cautionary potboiler. Don’t try this at home! Or in the White House Situation Room!
A lone nuclear missile has been launched, by a mysterious and anonymous national aggressor, from somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The nuke is rapidly heading toward the United States. How rapidly? In just 19 minutes, it will land somewhere in the Midwest — and it doesn’t take the American security apparatus long to figure out that that place is Chicago. Unless the weapon can be stopped, it will kill 10 million people on contact.
There’s an aesthetic paradox built into the opening half hour of “A House of Dynamite.” The movie is not a piece of grandiose Jerry Bruckheimer doom porn. Its tone is somber and responsible. Yet part of that is that it’s made in an aggressively overheated style of furrowed-brow thriller “importance” that’s meant to convey a vibe of verisimilitude. The split-second editing and hand-held camera. The way the film keeps flashing important-sounding government acronyms (PEOC, STRATCOM, OSD). The token slivers of human-interest drama (a divorce battle, a visit to the pediatrician) that are meant to counterpoint the possibility of Armageddon with the oh-so-ironic triviality of quotidian concerns. The ominoso soundtrack that keeps punching up the urgency of the situation like the music on one of those “investigative” tabloid-TV shows.
To be honest, I was surprised to see Kathryn Bigelow rely on so many of these breathless generic devices. At her best she’s a great filmmaker, one who brought the secret assassination of Osama bin Laden to a riveting pitch of authentic life in “Zero Dark Thirty,” and who in her follow-up film, “Detroit” (2017), dramatized the Algiers Motel incident that took place during Detroit’s 1967 12th Street Riot, imagining her way inside it with a complex force that got behind the face of American police brutality. But “Detroit,” vital a film as I thought it was, did not get a good response, and it went down as a major dud. Bigelow hasn’t directed another film until now, and “A House of Dynamite” is just the kind of movie you make when you’re trying to bounce back from a failure of that magnitude. It’s easy to watch, it’s wired to be exciting, with a showy hot-button relevance, but the problem with the movie is that it isn’t quite convincing. It’s trapped between trying to be a “serious” thriller and a piece of glorified schlock.
That opening half hour certainly holds us, as we suck in our breath at the prospect of a rogue missile speeding toward the U.S. We think: How is this going to be a real-time movie if the nuke is set to strike in just 19 minutes? Bigelow, working from a script by Noah Oppenheim (“Jackie”), ushers us into the White House Situation Room, the office of military command, and the Oval Office, all adjoined by video screens, and shows us the power players trying to coordinate a strategy — from Rebecca Ferguson as the Situation Room senior duty officer to Jason Clarke as her commander to Jared Harris as the fulminating Secretary of Defense to Tracy Letts as the hawkish general who commands STRATCOM (U.S. Strategic Command) to Anthony Ramos as the crew commander of Fort Greely in Alaska, a pivotal base of the nation’s Ballistic Missile Defense System. Each of these people have their assigned tasks, and speak in high-energy jargon, but their conversation boils down to “What the hell are we going to do?”
There’s really only one option: Shoot the missile out of the sky. They will do it with a GBI (Ground-Based Interceptor), which, in case you didn’t know, contains an EKV (Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle). “A House of Dynamite” is full of dialogue like “EKV is separated from the first GBI. One minute to intercept!” You would think that the United States, with an approaching nuclear missile, could summon all its might and technical know-how to neutralize the threat. But the movie’s big message is that that’s a reassuring illusion. As the deputy national security adviser, played by a disarmingly boyish Gabriel Basso (I’m sorry, he looks like someone whose job should be to run and get coffee), informs us, the chances of the GBI actually taking out the nuke are just 61 percent. Which causes Jared Harris’s testy defense secretary to exclaim, “So it’s a fucking coin toss? This is what $50 billion buys us?” (I guess he didn’t know.) “A House of Dynamite” stirs the pot of our fears, saying that the risk of a nuclear attack we can’t defend ourselves against is much greater than we’re accustomed to thinking. But do I actually trust what the movie is saying? Let’s just say that this is what a Netflix budget buys us.
That opening half hour comes to a close, and it turns out to be the first of three chapters. The other two will rewind and replay the exact same scenario, only from the vantage of different characters. I found this to be a mixed bag of a dramatic blueprint. The first section is reasonably tense and engrossing. But in the second part, when we realize that we’re going to be watching a different version of the same thing, like in “Rashomon” (except that there’s no contradiction among the points-of-view), it feels, dare I say it, repetitive. The second section focuses on the debate about who could have launched the nuke in the first place. North Korea seems the most obvious candidate, since it’s a rogue state. But the possibility of Russia is explored — the idea being that the Russians would want not to start a nuclear war but to sow the seeds of chaos in the U.S. But would that work? How could Russia launch a nuke at us without us knowing it was Russia? (I know, I know: That’s what $50 billion buys us.) And should the U.S. respond with an all-out retaliatory attack? “A House of Dynamite” seems to be taking place in a world where the threat of mutually assured destruction doesn’t exist.
The third episode replays these events from the POV of the President of the United States, and I have to say: Idris Elba, as the president, does not give a good performance. The president starts out by making a visit to Liberty Arena to play basketball with some school children, then gets jerked away when the crisis happens. But Elba, throughout, acts way too casual. He doesn’t seem presidential when he’s with those kids, and when confronted with the nuclear situation, he acts more regular-guy befuddled than commanding. Why is the deputy national security adviser — yes, the coffee kid — on the phone with a Russian official? Shouldn’t the president be on the phone with the Russian president? Why is he governing by hearsay? And why does he act like the binder of nuclear codes is a homework assignment he doesn’t want to bother to crack?
I get it: It’s only…a movie! But “A House of Dynamite” tries to have it both ways. It is, at heart, a rather farfetched piece of entertainment (which is fine), but it wants the credibility of making us say, “Oh! I didn’t realize how much danger we were in!” The title is the film’s metaphor for how we’re living, surrounded by the destructive power of nuclear weapons, with leaders who no longer share the post-Cold War dream of cutting down on the stockpile of them. But this actually comes off as a rather dated post-Cold War vision of what we have to fear. Yes, the more nuclear treaties the better. But the problem right now isn’t the number of weapons. It’s who’s in charge.