During the Cold War, the movie industry explored the threat of nuclear annihilation in a variety of different contexts, from Stanley Kubrick's absurdist satire Dr Strangelove to Mick Jackson's Threads — a harrowing, low-budget portrait of Great Britain in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Geopolitically, those were simpler times; no matter how gut-wrenching the subject matter, the players were clearly delineated into East vs West, Goodies vs Baddies, ‘Us’ vs ‘Them’.
In recent times, however, it's no coincidence that imminent nuclear war has ceased to attract the attention of filmmakers. The increasingly chaotic, reactionary, multi-polar world of today reflects the poet W.B. Yeats' observation that “things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” The sense that, no matter how dire the crisis, we could be pulled back from the brink of disaster by ‘men of good will’ is long-gone, leaving a grim feeling of inevitability that Hollywood has largely balked at addressing.
Director Kathryn Bigelow's return to feature filmmaking after an eight-year hiatus brings that drought to an abrupt end with the release of A House of Dynamite, a tense contemporary examination of the circumstances leading to a modern-day nuclear conflagration. Penned by former NBC news chief Noah Oppenheim (also responsible for Netflix's recent political thriller Zero Day), the film offers a forensic, second-by-second analysis of a sequence of cascading disasters that takes the world to the brink of Armageddon in a matter of minutes.
The film features an ensemble cast of top-drawer acting talent — Rebecca Ferguson as the senior officer in the White House Situation Room, Jared Harris as the Secretary of Defense, and Idris Elba as the President — and is structured into three discrete acts, each one telling the same story from three different perspectives. Each pass over the narrative puts the viewer in a different room as the same events unfold, gradually filling narrative blanks until the entire awful scenario is revealed.
The plot is simple, frightening, and told with a deliberately disturbing predictability. Three groups of political and military professionals arrive for work on ‘just another Monday’. They indulge in everyday conversational banalities: coffee, traffic, sports scores, who's getting married. Suddenly, long-range military radar detects a missile inbound to the continental United States from an unknown launch point. An Air Force base in Alaska attempts to shoot the missile down, but fails to connect with the target, and it soon becomes apparent that the weapon is heading directly for Chicago.
[WARNING: SPOILER AHEAD! Skip the next paragraph to bypass it.]
The picture Bigelow paints is a study of the horror of helplessness. Every painstakingly structured military response protocol proves useless against the remorseless advance of the radar blip heading inexorably towards its target, the awful truth etched ever deeper on the faces of the players as the countdown ticks towards zero. Bigelow's powerfully-made point is that nuclear war is (to crib John Badham's WarGames) “a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
Oppenheim's razor-sharp script is, sadly, already out of date: his corridors of power are populated by consummate experts, dedicated professionals who find themselves pitted against an impossible scenario. Given the current real-world occupants of those positions, one can only mutter quietly: “God help us all.”
Recently arrived in the Tri-Cities from Scotland, Damian Beagan is a former freelancer who wrote movie and music reviews for a variety of UK websites.
