@Courtesy of Netflix

A House of Dynamite is the best and most important movie about nuclear threat since Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Stanley Kubrick. Working on the articulate screenplay by Noah Oppenheim, Kathryn Bigelow has directed a high-tension drama that explores the danger and dilemmas of a nuclear attack from different but equally important points of view. 

This is the simple plot: it’s a totally common day in Washington D.C., at least until an unidentified missile is launched from somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, and it’s targeting the East Coast of the United States. The menace must be stopped at any coast, otherwise in less than twenty minutes millions of people will be annihilated in the blink of an eye. 

A House of Dynamite shows these twenty minutes or so first from the perspective of those who are supposed to stop the missile. The first third is the best of the entire movie, tense and realistic like The Hurt Locker or Zero Dark Thirty were. At the center of the plot there is Captain Olivia Walker, perfectly played by an intense Rebecca Ferguson. She is one of the last possibilities to avoid the unimaginable catastrophe, but she is also a mother and a wife: a character that must endure in her sense of duty otherwise everything  – and everyone around here – will be lost.

@Courtesy of Netflix

The first chapter of this Rashomon-like trilogy is a sort of preamble, showing the drama of human beings and professionals who see life as they know it completely gone. It is about half an hour, forty minutes of incredible cinema, scanned down by the timer until the moment of the impact. The editing by Kirk Baxter, the suffocating score by Volker Bertelmann, the controlled and still vibrant cinematography by Barry Ackroyd help Kathryn Bigelow to create something that is impossible to forget. Until the very last second of this part of the movie, it is quite difficult to breathe because of the tension created by what we are experiencing, as viewers and as citizens living in the United States. 

The problem of repeating the same events three times is that that same, astonishing tension it’s impossible to replicate over and over. And in fact A House of Dynamite becomes different, not necessarily better on a cinematic level but maybe even more important, because it pushes the audience to think about other sides of the story: the second part is at the core a debate about how to respond to such a devastating attack. Would it be a better choice to use diplomacy in order to avoid other nuclear strikes, or take advantage of the United States’ power of destruction in order to prevent further attacks? This dilemma is developed essentially through two characters, one of which is General Anthony Brady played by Tracy Letts with charisma and a sense of gravitas.

This is by far the most “political” section of the movie, written with an enormous sense of duty, not serving easy answers but on the contrary raising appropriate and unfortunately realistic questions. The last third of A House of Dynamite explores finally the moral struggle of the POTUS, who with such a short notice has to basically decide the fate of the entire planet. Idris Elba’s performance is effective, especially when showing the humanity behind the status, the fear and uncertainty behind any doubt and consequent decision. Despite the understandable intention to show the psychological side of a man with this power, it is probably the part of the movie that is less convincing, even if still capable of raising lots of questions.

In the end, Kathryn Bigelow has realized maybe not her best movie so far, but surely one of the most important of the year. In doing so, she has slightly changed, maybe it’s better writing “calibrate” her style in order to make it more composed, more held back in order to better represent the horror that the whole bunch of characters of A House of Dynamite have to face. A choice that demonstrates once again the intelligence and versatility of one of the greatest filmmakers of our times.

@Courtesy of Netflix

Rate: B+

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Here’s the trailer for A House of Dynamite: