A House of Dynamite

The short version is that it would be infinitely more devastating than most of us could possibly imagine. The long version is best summarized by one of Jacobsen’s most haunting passages: “Over the course of two weeks, in every simulated scenario — and despite whatever particularly triggering event started the war game — nuclear war always ended the same way. With the same outcome. There is no way to win a nuclear war once it starts. There is no such thing as de-escalation.” Keep that in mind when, just minutes into Kathryn Bigelow’s propulsive new Netflix thriller, a single nuclear missile is fired at the United States.

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A House of Dynamite is terrifying in its own right, though not in the same way as most Halloween viewing. Covering a roughly 18-minute period from three different perspectives, the film imagines how the U.S. government might respond to the launch of a single nuclear warhead whose flight trajectory at first suggests, then quickly confirms, that it’s headed toward Chicago. Is this a drill? No. Who fired the nuke? No one knows and there isn’t enough time to find out. Do we retaliate and risk a full-blown nuclear apocalypse or let a major U.S. city get wiped off the map and hope it ends there?

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The last question is for the president to decide, but for the first hour of the film he’s merely heard, not seen. As in Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, with which A House of Dynamite could be said to form a loose trilogy, the focus is on the boots on the ground. Most of the ensemble have jobs few viewers will have known existed: Rebecca Ferguson plays an oversight officer in the White House Situation Room, Gabriel Basso is the Deputy National Security Advisor, and Tracy Letts steals scenes as the Combatant Commander of United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM).

A uniquely kinetic filmmaker, Bigelow’s ability to imbue every ground-level action with a screaming sense of urgency remains unparalleled. So steady is her directorial hand that you can easily imagine her switching careers and heading one of the governmental agencies tasked with responding to the crises that most of her recent work has been about. Every ominous-sounding acronym, long-winded job title, and bit of technical jargon screenwriter Noah Oppenheim throws into the script adds to the intrigue. You feel as though you should already be familiar with all these details and that failure to do so only raises the stakes of the scenario.

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On paper, this might sound similar to a Mission: Impossible film. Anyone familiar with Bigelow’s prior work, especially The Hurt Locker (for which she became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director) and Zero Dark Thirty, will know that her grounded, meticulous approach is all the more thrilling precisely because it eschews blockbuster conventions in favor of hyperrealism. Watching numbers change on a screen has never been so nerve-jangling: as the impact probability rises from 23% to 67% to 100% and DEFCON is raised from 4 to 2 and finally 1, the sickening, inescapable gravity of the situation sets in for us as quickly as it does for the government officials realizing that they’re utterly unmatched by a situation for which they’ve spent their entire careers training.

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They’re less prepared for this apocalyptic scenario because, at a certain point, there simply is no preparing for it. Basso’s character likens intercepting a nuke that’s already been launched to hitting a bullet with a bullet — an almost impossible degree of in-the-moment accuracy that trillions of dollars and more than half a century of planning simply can’t account for once we’ve been fired upon. We’ll have minutes, not hours, to try to determine who did this and how to respond, and there are no good options: “surrender or suicide,” as one of them puts it. The more the clock ticks down as the president scrambles for more information from his subordinates, the less it seems like his decision will make any difference.

Bigelow’s ability to imbue every ground-level action with a screaming sense of urgency remains unparalleled.

Covering the same events from three different points of view does come with diminishing returns, however. The perspectives overlap too much, and aren’t different enough from one another, for the technique to raise tension as much as it’s trying to. But it does make finally seeing the president more impactful after only hearing his familiar-sounding voice as a blank square on a Zoom call. It feels as though the movie, and the moment, has reached a true point of no return.

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Anyone seeking traditional resolution or even concrete answers to most of the questions raised by the plot will be disappointed, maybe even angry. At the risk of being pedantic, that’s kind of the point. Once a single nuclear warhead is launched, regardless of who fired it and where it’s headed, there’s no coming back for any of us. Since a more conventional narrative arc would be letting both the viewer and this entire system off the hook, Bigelow instead models hers after after a nuclear bomb: once in flight, catastrophe is certain no matter where it lands.

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“A nuclear crisis is not a worst-case scenario,” Jacobsen writes, “it is the worst-case scenario.” The speed with which everything human civilization has accomplished can and will be reduced to rubble is mind-boggling. You can accuse Bigelow and Oppenheim of not telling a conventionally satisfying story if you like, but you can’t accuse them of not telling the truth. Just because there will be survivors doesn’t mean there will be any winners.