Global peace is a house of cards

Eight years after her previous film – the crime drama Detroit – received a muted response, director Kathryn Bigelow returns to the genre in which she’s won her greatest acclaim.

Although Bigelow describes her new war thriller as part of an “unofficial triptych” formed with The Hurt Locker (2008) – for which she became the first woman to win an Oscar for best director – and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), A House of Dynamite is unlike the first two in that it doesn’t offer a snapshot of a single character’s involvement in a historical US military operation. Instead, it creates a frighteningly realistic what-if scenario that serves as a cautionary tale to a public that has become largely complacent about the threat of nuclear war.

At the end of the Cold War, the film tells us, leaders around the globe agreed that the world was better off with fewer nuclear weapons. But since then, the threat of mutually assured destruction – that if one superpower were to attack another with a nuclear bomb, they would end up destroying each other – has largely fallen from the public consciousness. More than offering entertainment, Bigelow’s latest film wants to remind viewers that in keeping these nuclear arsenals, we are all living in a house filled with dynamite that could blow at any second.

The movie opens early in the morning in Washington, DC, with Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) kissing her husband and toddler goodbye before heading to take over as shift leader in the White House Situation Room. We follow her and a few others in the US government and military – including Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos), commander of interceptor-missile base Fort Greely – as they shift their attention from personal relationships to the procedures they must follow when starting their highly classified jobs. The film emphasises that all this is routine to them: even when an unidentified intercontinental ballistic missile is detected mid-flight over the Pacific Ocean, it’s just another announcement among many.

This means the audience might almost miss a message coming through saying that the missile is about to go suborbital, but the shocked reaction from the characters quickly brings home that this is anything but routine.

Bigelow deftly cuts between a vast group of role players who must jump on a video call to try to figure out what’s going on as the tension mounts. From General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts), commander of the US strategic command, to defence secretary Reid Baker (Jared Harris), viewers might initially struggle to remember who’s who in this ensemble and understand what they’re talking about when dropping jargon and acronyms. But the stakes quickly become clear as the camera focuses on the characters’ horrified faces when they start to realise the missile is going to hit Chicago and there’s nothing that can be done to stop it.

The film jumps back twice to restart the 20-minute sequence of events, following some of the other role players – such as deputy national security adviser Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) – who only appeared on the video call in the previous segments as they also head to work and are then confronted by this frightening scenario.

Although it initially seems as if Ferguson is playing the lead, this is an ensemble film in which some superb actors – including Greta Lee as an expert on North Korea and Kaitlyn Dever as Baker’s estranged daughter – only get a few minutes of screen time. But as the film largely relies on their characters’ reactions to events rather than depicting any action sequences, casting a top-notch cast in these relatively small roles makes sense. The script by Noah Oppenheim adds just enough moments of personal interaction for each character to make them feel like real people without resorting to heavy-handed emotional manipulation.

The documentary style of shooting with largely hand-held cameras and the focus on tiny details creates a sense of realism and plausibility, while the ominous score by Oscar-winning composer Volker Bertelmann added to the mounting sense of dread.

The final sequence is carried by Idris Elba playing the US president, who must make the agonising decision of whether to retaliate without the certainty of which foreign government is to blame. It’s sobering to realise that though there are dozens of role players in this scenario, it all comes down to the US president to decide whether the globe is plunged into World War 3.

The ending might frustrate some viewers, but by offering no easy answers or solutions, A House of Dynamite serves as a wake-up call, provoking contemplation of what nuclear warfare could mean and how fragile the global status quo really is. DM

A House of Dynamite is on Netflix.

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.