A House of Dynamite Kathryn Bigalow (2025; USA) Ensemble piece that includes as players: Idris Elba. Rebecca Furguson
Yesterday upon the stair I met a man who wasn’t there
OK! This is serious stuff, we’re talking assured mutual destruction the nuclear winter the end of life on earth as we know it but….
…something in Kathryn Bigalow’s ‘A House of Dynamite’ is lacking. Her film has an empty centre, there’s a hole in the scenario where meaning and tension seep out leaving her ensemble of actors looking like they’re going through the motions of being busy busy in their bunkers responding to the nuclear attack situation: Bigalow’s drama becomes abstracted rather than real.
The proposition which governs the scenario is that an unknown country has launched a nuclear missile at the USA aimed at Chicago. The film’s structure centres around the ‘final minutes’ time window of this nuclear attack as experienced from different American defence and executive perspectives. The script takes up its story when there are some 18 minutes to ground zero. The film opens with the scene in the Washington monitoring hub, moves onto the missile defence, the military response centre finally ending up with the chief executive, the President, flying in a helicopter to his safe place, who must decide how the USA is going to respond. As the scenario moves to each of the locations, the countdown clock is wound back to allow each setting to play out its own ‘drama’.
Bigalow’s script bigs up on the human side of the action. Many of the settings are realised as shots full of crowded movement centred about screens that dominate the spaces whilst the countdown clock ticks away the minutes and seconds left until impact. Within the crowded frames the scenario focuses on particular individuals who are split in their attention between the looming disaster unfolding before them and immediate concerns in their private lives.
Rooms are not just rooms…
…but the way in which these private concerns are realised is the problem with House of Dynamite. The various rooms/locations in which the drama of the countdown plays out are not just spaces: they are a states of mind; states of mind that are all encompassing. To be in the room is to be enclosed in a state of mind.
Bigalow’s script wants to show us the ‘human’ side of her characters, the individual the personal. In order to do so she makes the decision to move her film away from the clock, out of the confines of the monitoring rooms into specific places of the personal world. Her movie leaves the collective state of mind in the room and embraces a distant personal literality. The Washington incident room’s manager is worrying about her sick child, so the script literally cuts away to shows us her little boy at the doctors; likewise we’re shown see the Secretary of State’s daughter being cute in Chicago, the President’s wife out on safari in Africa.
The consequence is that the inherent tensions of the film collapse. The proposition, the core of the movie, becomes distant and less urgent.
The clock ticks down nobody’s watching.
The count down image is tethered to the respective spaces; the clock has no existence outside the room. Each time Bigalow moves outside room the clock vanishes and it becomes progressively more difficult to re-establish its ominous presence as it ticks down towards mass death. The parallel cutting between the rooms that engender their own state of mind and the littoral location of the personal stories rather than allowing the images to intensify by playing off each other, has the opposite effect. It dulls the senses, renders the approaching catastrophe as an increasingly abstract proposition.
The clock vanishes.
The shortcomings of Bigalow’s movie are epitomised in the final scene in which the President is being flown to a safe space accompanied only by the man with the nuclear codes. He decides to call his wife who’s on Safari in Africa watching baby elephants. At this point in House of Dynamite, baby elephants seem more interesting than the President. Before he can really explain the nature of the problem to her – that he has to decide whether or not to end the world – the connection between them is cut. No more baby elephants and Mr President turns his mind to figuring out the conundrum: whether to let the strike on Chicago go unanswered; or order a full retaliatory strike against the possible enemies China or Russia. But no matter what kind of face Idris Elba pulls no matter how much he writhes about in his chair, he looks no more than an overwrought academic wrestling with some abstruse philosophical argument, and House of Dynamite splutters and peters out with the damp squid of an anti-climax. And as the President pales into indecision he starts to come across a little like President Obama in his second term: “…The man who wasn’t there….”
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk
