Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow
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From the late 1980s to the turn of the millennium, Kathryn Bigelow was making exhilarating, borderline-trashy cult genre flicks like Near Dark, Blue Steel, Strange Days and Point Break. Later, she was granted prestige via her war-zone thrillers The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, the former of which made her the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director. But she’s been somewhat AWOL since the tepid response to her 2017 rogue-police drama Detroit, only directing a handful of short films over the past eight years.
What a relief, then, to report that A House of Dynamite feels like a real return to form; a genuinely electrifying race-against-the-clock thri-ller that’s as frightening as it is gripping. This isn’t the first time Bigelow has tackled the existential terror of mutually assured destruction — 2002’s K-19: The Widowmaker told the true story of a disaster aboard a Soviet nuclear submarine. But this time, Bigelow is unencumbered by history, free to speculate on what such a scenario might look like in all its sobering absurdity.
After being subjected to some stomach-churning statistics regarding the post-Cold War escalation of nuclear weapons, we’re quickly drawn into multiple parallel storylines of people who each have a role to play, large or small, within the US’ nuclear-defence plan, from the tie-wearing decision-makers in Washington DC to the troops on a faraway army base.
This is much less of an individual character study than The Hurt Locker or Zero Dark Thirty. If there is a protagonist here, it’s probably Captain Olivia Walker, played by a steely Rebecca Ferguson. Her work day begins like any other, kissing her husband and son goodbye, arriving at the White House, imprisoning her phone in a secure locker and entering the Situation Room, a dark, subterranean enclave filled with screens soon to be broadcasting the stuff of nightmares. An intercontinental ballistic missile is heading straight for Chicago, and those working behind the scenes have to work out who launched it and how to respond to it, the fate of the world teetering on the edge of a precipice.
“If there’s an element of Hollywood fantasy here, it’s that those in the White House are entirely honourable. The President is eventually revealed to be played by an affable Idris Elba, absent from initial calls about the crisis because he’s shooting hoops with a girls’ basketball team. His characterisation certainly feels like a hangover from the Obama era, but Oppenheim and Bigelow don’t lionise their fictional POTUS either. Bigelow wisely decides not to indulge in any spectacle of violence and destruction, knowing full well that her audience’s anticipation of the inevitable is far more frightening than what she might be able to present visually.”
Noah Oppenheim, the screenwriter behind Pablo Larraín’s Jackie and Netflix’s cyber-attack series Zero Day, was previously president of NBC News, and his script teems with impenetrable acronyms and technical terms that we can safely assume are the real deal. Oppenheim splits the film into a triptych of interweaving perspectives, each one ending with the final moments before impact (or not, as there’s always a chance the missile will malfunction), with the next chapter resetting to the beginning of the crisis and adopting the points of view of what seemed to be secondary characters. This does mean that some of the excellent ensemble cast are underused; Greta Lee, in particular, is barely given a chance to make an impression. Jared Harris has the most impact in the final section as the Secretary of Defence confronting the imminent death of his estranged daughter, but Gabriel Basso stands out as Jake, the rather hapless young Deputy National Security Advisor suddenly thrust into a key diplomatic position, much to his sceptical superiors’ chagrin.
If there’s an element of Hollywood fantasy here, it’s that those in the White House are entirely honourable. The President is eventually revealed to be played by an affable Idris Elba, absent from initial calls about the crisis because he’s shooting hoops with a girls’ basketball team. His characterisation certainly feels like a hangover from the Obama era, but Oppenheim and Bigelow don’t lionise their fictional POTUS either: his head of security (Brian Tee) wryly comments that, “He’s my third [President] and they’re all chronically late narcissists. At least this one reads a paper.”
Bigelow wisely decides not to indulge in any spectacle of violence and destruction, knowing full well that her audience’s anticipation of the inevitable is far more frightening than what she might be able to present visually. A House of Dynamite might not tell us anything particularly new (surely, we all know that nuclear weapons are terrifying), but it’s delivered so deftly, it’s difficult to care. If only all cautionary tales could be this brilliantly entertaining.
– Courtesy: Empireonline.com