A House of Dynamite

by Julian Spivey

Photo: Netflix

Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Starring: Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba & Gabriel Basso 
Rated: R (language)
Runtime: 1 hour & 52 minutes

Director Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film, “A House of Dynamite,” her first in eight years, is the story of what happens when the U.S. Government realizes it’s about to be attacked with a nuclear weapon but doesn’t know its origin and must decide how to respond.

The film is told from three different perspectives in a non-linear fashion, showing the same sequence of events through the eyes of different characters, with differing results as far as storytelling and entertainment go.

The story opens with Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), the duty officer in charge of the White House Situation Room, and Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos), the commander of missile defenses at Fort Greely, Alaska. We meet other characters during this segment, including Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso), United States Strategic Command leader Gen. Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts), White House Situation Room director Admiral Mark Miller (Jason Clarke) and Secretary of Defense Reid Baker (Jared Harris), but the first 30 minutes or so is mostly through the eyes of Walker and Gonzalez with the nuke being found on radar, its trajectory being narrowed down to somewhere in the American Midwest and the missile defenses attempt to shoot it down, which evidently only has a 60% success rate.

The first segment, where we don’t yet know how the end result of the nuke is going to play out, is the most thrilling of “A House Full of Dynamite,” with the viewers getting to see how the events would play out – and supposedly the film is quite accurate with this – in real time.

And then we get the answer as to what happens with the nuke. And we get a perspective switch to where the main characters in the story are now: Gen. Brady, Baerington, and, to a lesser extent, Admiral Miller.

It was likely due to finding the performances of Letts, Basso and Clarke to be engaging that the second segment of the film – again lasting about 30 minutes in length – still worked for me. You see the incident from their point of view, and you see how a certain lucky few on the White House staff are whisked away to a safer, more secure location – sorry, Capt. Walker – and you see how they try to decide what comes next if the nuke does, indeed, wipe out a major U.S. city.

That leads to the third segment of the film, which is the most problematic and not what you want from the ending of your film, but I also didn’t mind it as much as many viewers and critics seemed to. This is where we finally get to lay eyes on the President of the United States (Idris Elba), who’s been out at an event and has only now been reachable by a satellite phone, which is why he’s the one character never seen during the first two segments.

Throughout the first two segments, we saw a bunch of people who knew exactly what they were doing, even if it didn’t always work out. But here, we have the leader of the free world seemingly not knowing what to do. Some viewers have an issue with this, but I ask you to look at who has been in the real White House over the last decade and tell me if you think they’d be in a great position if a similar situation were to happen.

I’m willing to give directors and screenwriters, Noah Oppenheim wrote this one, the benefit of the doubt when it comes to making movies in ways outside of the norm, but I do wonder if “A House of Dynamite” might have been a better film, or at least more entertaining, had it been told in a linear fashion.

Despite that question, I did mostly enjoy the film, and my issues had more to do with certain things that didn’t need to be in the script, but were, and by this I mean entire characters like Moses Ingram as a FEMA official and Willa Fitzgerald as a journalist, who seemingly had zero reasoning for being included, and made me wonder if things had been left on the cutting room floor.

“A House of Dynamite” is streaming on Netflix.