Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite” starts out with a bang and a rush, and for a while it looks as if it’ll be one of the most straightforward and streamlined of the Oscar-winning director’s films. At an hour and 52 minutes long, it’s the first Bigelow film since 2000’s “The Weight of Water” to come in at under two hours, and from the opening frames it moves with an all-consuming sense of urgency.
For the most part, this Netflix film is all tension, all the time. And it makes it clear once again, as if we needed another reminder, just what an accomplished and dynamic filmmaker Bigelow is. With the help of an essential team that includes cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, editor Kirk Baxter, composer Volker Bertelmann and sound designer Paul N.J. Ottosson, “A House of Dynamite” manages to be a white-knuckle thriller in which almost all of the onscreen “action” consists of people talking on the phone or staring at screens.
The setup is brutally simple: A U.S. military base in Alaska picks up a launch somewhere off the coast of Asia. It appears to be a missile of some sort, but we don’t know who launched it, or whether it’s a test or a threat. The U.S. Strategic Command is alerted, as is the White House Situation Room. And when more intel comes in and it appears that some kind of warhead is headed for Chicago and will hit in 19 minutes, every branch of the military and government is in a headlong rush to figure out what is happening, who’s responsible and what to do about it.
Almost all of “A House of Dynamite” takes place in those 19 minutes … but it’s not that simple, and it should hardly come as a surprise to learn that the headlong momentum of those first scenes is not the only trick Bigelow has up her sleeve. In a way, she’s in familiar territory here; as she did in “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” she takes a journalistic approach (working with screenwriter and former NBC News president Noah Oppenheim) that allows her to urgently delineate the inner workings of the national security apparatus with a muscularity that is all her own.
But the film has its twists, turns and resets, simultaneously giving the audience more information while also keeping it off balance. It can be riveting and at times repetitive, but it does what it sets out to do: It drops you in the middle of a crisis and it keeps you there.
“A House of Dynamite” is the story of one morning and one event, told in an immersive way that doesn’t stop to supply context or tell us more about these characters than we can figure out in the briefest of conversations. The film is on the clock from its opening moments – but when the clock is about to run out, it backs up and shows us the same 19 minutes from a different perspective.
So the first time we run through the countdown, we watch the soldiers at the 49th Missile Defense Battallion in Fort Greely, Alaska, and the Watch Floor Senior Duty Officer at the White House (Rebecca Ferguson) and the FEMA Director of the Office of National Continuity (Moses Ingram) and the Situation Room senior director (Jason Clarke) and others who go by in a flash, along with more acronyms and military terms than anybody can keep straight (PEOC, USSTRATCOM, SECDEF, GBI and EKV, which I’m sure we all know refers to the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle), though they are all explained quickly with onscreen titles.
The second time around, we start at an undisclosed location in the Indo-Pacific Command, and also track down a national intelligence officer who’s taken her son to a Civil War re-enactment. We hear the President of the United States on the phone but we don’t see him in this version – but when the clock resets again and the film goes through that 19 minutes a third time, Idris Elba’s POTUS is the central figure. Sometimes a conversation we’ve already seen will play out again, but from a different vantage point; sometimes an entirely new viewpoint will drop in, including the dizzying variety of options for nuclear retaliation contained in the “nuclear football” that never leaves the president’s side.
It’s a lot to take in and a lot to keep straight, but “A House of Dynamite” delivers it with blunt efficiency. When at one point an aide says, “We need to slow down, Mr. President,” the POTUS sums it up nicely: “Time is a luxury we do not have. We are about to lose Chicago, and I do not know why.”
By the time it’s over, Jared Harris has delivered a particularly wrenching performance as the Secretary of Defense, whose daughter is in Chicago, and one of Bertelmann’s best scores has gone from portentous chords to insistent pulses to staccato strings. Ackroyd’s camera pans from faces to screens and back, recalling some of the urgency of last year’s “September 5,” another film that takes place mostly in contained spaces.
There’s gallows humor here, but mostly the film follows grim people trying not to panic. And it delivers a sobering assessment of a world in which some leaders continue to at least speak about using nuclear weapons, and our best lines of defense have a success rate that’s marginally better than a coin toss.
At one point in the film, the president snaps, “This is insanity!”
“No sir,” says the STRATCOM commander played by Tracy Letts. “It’s reality.”
And it’s Bigelow.
