Armageddon is here again, as Kathryn Bigelow’s first film in eight years examines the minutes before a nuclear missile hits Chicago from multiple perspectives, finding no hope anywhere.
Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) is our first witness, clocking on as normal in the White House Situation Room, where a missile launch at a febrile international moment is at first logged as inconsequential. When it sickeningly dips from orbit towards the US, Ferguson’s patrician cool exudes the comforting professionalism you’d wish for at the potential end of the world, till she calls her husband and child and tells them to run. Meanwhile, Deputy National Security Adviser Baerington (Gabriel Basso, pictured below) phones into a conference call while jogging through DC traffic, breathlessly arguing to avert World War Three, and the Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris) desperately tries to reach his daughter in Chicago. As for the President, he’s “off-campus” and yet to be reached, as the clock ticks.
Bigelow repeatedly calibrates degrees of slowly thawing disbelief, as America’s ultimate first responders shake themselves awake to an unimaginable reality. Reactions are fatally off, unable to correspond to the degree of peril. A House of Dynamite’s title refers to a world that’s been booby-trapped with planet-shattering ordinance for so long that we have ceased to consider it. Cinema too has mothballed this nightmare. Fail Safe, Dr. Strangelove (both 1964) and Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977) once seriously considered launches, Threads (1984) showed the fallout, fantasy was filled with radioactive accidents and post-war wastelands, and James Bond defused the danger with a second to spare again and again. Bigelow reactivates the protocol as a timely warning.
Screenwriter Noah Oppenheim is the former president of NBC News, and co-wrote the De Niro-starring cyberattack series Zero Day. He’s into faintly absurd insider jargon (“Oval spray, full lid”), but lands the presumably well-founded point that we are unprepared. “It’s like hitting a bullet with a bullet,” Baerington says of the chance of anti-missile ballistics downing the attack. The success rate is “a coin-toss”, with no Plan B.
Bigelow is a consummate action director, and loves the hardware and martial professionalism as silos open, planes launch and soldiers and the Secret Service slickly do their duty. Amidst the countdowns and manoeuvres, though, the catastrophic reality of 10 million set to die in Chicago (and another million downwind) becomes lost. Military and political professionals accept the fact to continue to function, and so does the film. Lingering, sentimental shots of doomed children’s toys hardly convey what’s coming.
We’re kept guessing about the absent President. When he eventually joins the Situation Room call, his image is switched off, and his gruff difficulty in grasping the situation suggests Trump. In fact, it’s Idris Elba, pictured above, fresh from playing the UK PM in Heads of State (2024). Here he’s an Obama-like man of the people, shooting hoops with schoolkids while, with sly irony, Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” plays. Swept away by car and copter, he squints pained at the sunlight, just a man dwarfed by the moment’s enormity. Then a thin-smiled Navy type always at hand for this moment presents his booklet of retaliatory options like a maître d’.
A House of Dynamite doesn’t ratchet up the tension like Bigelow’s best, suffering in this sense from its repeated scenario. But as a cautionary tale without an exit, it lingers.
