The Big Nothing

A  House of Dynamite should be fantastic. It starts with a great premise: Let’s do a procedural of what would happen if the U.S. faced a sudden nuclear attack via an ICBM in the Pacific, but of indeterminate origin. It could be Russian, Chinese, or North Korean. We look at the military, security state, and elected political apparatus moving into gear, anchored with a greatly talented cast: Idris Elba as president of the United States, Rebecca Ferguson as Captain Olivia Walker, the most senior officer in the White House Situation Room, Jared Harris as secretary of defense, and Gabriel Basso as a young deputy national security adviser. Finally, put the project in the hands of Kathryn Bigelow, who is a can’t-miss director of tension- and adrenaline-filled war-on-terror movies such as Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker.

And I can say that the performances and premise make A House of Dynamite worth watching if you have a Netflix subscription. However, instead of the sum of all fears, we have a film less than the sum of its parts. In a sense, it succeeds as a piece of exploratory journalism and, in doing so, fails as a drama.

Once America’s military and security state notices the missile, the countdown begins, roughly 20 minutes until impact. Screenwriter Noah Oppenheim’s decision to disguise the identity of the bad actor who lobbed this nuke at the United States serves an important purpose, allowing the movie to be about the nature of nuclear weapons and the worldwide, interlocking set of security systems built around them, rather than about one geopolitical malefactor. The Matthew Broderick–fronted War Games tried to do something similar by having a computer system seemingly take over NORAD, subtracting the human element.

In A House of Dynamite, by the time the satellites and sensors of our military are able to determine that Chicago is the target, it is too late for even those in the know to urge family members to make an escape. Our missile defense systems have ten minutes to respond and a shorter window in which to act. The immediate and severe posture the United States takes as an automatic response to this one missile pushes China, Russia, and all nuclear powers to respond in kind, readying to empty their silos and disappearing their submarines. The president must make potentially world-destroying decisions in the very moments he is being whisked away to a bunker. One adviser emphasizes how provocative U.S. action would be, especially when it is acting blind to the actual threat. Another, that failing to respond would encourage more attacks and potentially render all of America’s weapons useless, while acting now against all adversaries simultaneously could, at the cost of millions of lives across all our adversaries, potentially salvage a future. Even as they are trying to manage the crisis, all sorts of senior advisers are being pulled from their rooms to be placed in mountain bunkers, emphasizing that those left behind are deemed expendable. A military aide with the president’s codes hands him the book of options, darkly joking that he calls them “rare, medium, and well-done.”

The problem is that the film is all sizzle and no steak. The 20-minute countdown is replayed three separate times, from three separate perspectives over the course of the nearly two-hour film. This allows for some fun setups and games of information-withholding from the audience. For instance, we learn early in the first telling that the secretary of defense’s daughter is in Chicago. Later, we get to witness a beautiful phone call between father and daughter in which he does not betray her awful fate to her but assures her of his love and prideful satisfaction with her life. Later still, we see how this awful foreknowledge and certainty unmoors the commanding man.

Moments like those are the whole satisfaction. The screen goes blank before anything goes bang. And on reflection there are problems created by the plot. Why does the president worry about what the American people will think of him for refusing to fire back over one city, and putting the rest of the country and world in certain peril, when the military has been unable to identify the enemy? How was it that everyone missed the origin of the launch? China, Russia, and North Korea would have every incentive to tattle on each other, too, if the U.S. was confused about it.

The point of the film is that the system taken together is unmanageable and irrational. We’ve inherited a set of weapons and interlocking systems that make disaster more likely in the case of one rogue action. And the film succeeds at making this point, but only because of a critical flaw in its conception. Obscuring the origin of the attack removes the responsibility for it. This irrational system works, and has worked, for seven decades because the satellites, the sensors, the key-codes, and the target maps are held by men who themselves are gripped by depthless fear.