A House Of Dynamite Review
Tense, but frustrating viewing.
When a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States, a race begins to determine who is responsible, and how to respond.
A House Of Dynamite plays out in a series of vignettes, following different groups of military / civil servants as they respectively deal with an almost real-time crisis. We initially follow Captain Olivia Walker in the White House interspersed with scenes with Major Daniel Gonzalez at a remote missile defense system launch site, before transitioning to follow the Secretary of Defense Reid Baker, General Anthony Brady, Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington, and finally a sequence with the President himself. All of these viewpoints serve to showcase the communication failures, and the ineffectiveness of many hands in a situation where no one really knows what to do.
Some of the cast are very strong - Rebecca Ferguson, as always, carries any scene she’s in. Idris Elba and Jason Clarke are great additions, and Jarred Harris is always a welcome sight. But some of the side characters can be a little grating at times in their complete self-interest.
Visually, this is a good looking but unadventurous film, although it has little ability to break the mould given the settings it is dealing with.
Ultimately, this movie comes down to two things; does it build tension, and does that tension pay off.
To the first end, undoubtedly the film is a tense watch. Bigelow does another astounding job of masterfully building up pressure and tension to an almost unbearable point, pushing ever closer towards catastrophe. We’re left on the edge of our seats, baited breath, chewing our nails, as we wonder what is about to happen. It’s a masterclass, and what’s so impressive here about that is that she doesn’t have the - perhaps easier - settings of a military battlefield in The Hurt Locker or dank prison cells in Zero Dark Thirty to rely on. In this film, she gets that same tension in an office space, or in a car stuck in traffic. The wonderful score goes a long way towards aiding this as well.
The issue comes with that second goal, to pay the tension off. And while this movie undoubtedly serves its purpose of confronting our complete unreadiness and lack of safety net for a nuclear strike, and it ends in a way that supports the statement it’s been making all the way through, it also ends in a payoff that feels like a bit of a letdown. Perhaps that could have been fixed with footage of an explosion, perhaps not, but it’s tough to deny that at the end of the film, you’re left with a distinct sense of feeling like something was missing.
