On a Nuclear Day You Can See Forever: Bigelow’s Living in a Powder-keg, Giving Off Sparks
With the doomsday clock adjusted to eighty-nine seconds to midnight at the dawn of 2025, something like Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film, A House of Dynamite, has a queasy aftertaste despite styled as a meaty popcorn flick. Resembling something like a mixture between her previous films Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), Bigelow proves to be in top form when it comes to tension building and pacing whilst utilizing real-world anxieties which, in a previous era, wouldn’t hit so close to home. Instead of the meteors threatening to plunge into the Earth from any number of sci-fi disaster films, a nuclear missile has been detected hurtling towards the US, its origin unknown, leaving the White House scrambling to intercept it in under twenty minutes. Scripted by Noah Oppenheim (The Maze Runner, 2014; “Zero Days,” 2025), its a narrative clearly meant to stoke increasing fears, at least judging from an early tagline, “Not if. When.”
On one otherwise pleasant day, Olivia (Rebecca Ferguson), the SITROOM Watch Floor Senior Duty Officer who works in the White House Situation Room, is confronted with a nightmare scenario when it’s determined an unattributed missile has been launched at the United States. Assembling the major players assembled to deal with the crisis, an Alaska based command and control center launches Ground-Based Interceptors to potentially stop it. With contact imminent in twenty minutes, predicted to lay waste to Chicago, they must also scramble to determine which of the country’s enemies is responsible and determine a plan of retaliation.
The impetus for A House of Dynamite regards our willful reluctance to contend with escalating global tension in a world seemingly more unstable than ever. Nuclear warfare is still beyond our comprehension, if we’re judging by a lack of preparedness in our infrastructures (save for those who have time and resources to do so). As such, there’s much to marvel at considering probability and the audacity of confronting what this scenario might actually look like, though ironically it’s depicted as the failure of what appears to be a qualified presidential administration. So there’s the dismal reality of a current dystopian backslide in the US which makes this film even more difficult to contend with when imagining such an occurrence being handled by the grossly incompetent. However, at times, A House of Dynamite does seem as if certain characterizations could have been more nuanced. Titles and terminology swirl around us in the film as panicked character race to find a solution, but eventually this feels like the overstuffed disaster epic ensembles of yore (The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, etc.).
While this is vastly better than the B-grade action franchise generated by Olympus Has Fallen (2012), the fatal error of the film exists in its structural foundation. There are three separate ‘perspectives,’ each overlapping in the twenty minute showdown to the potential oblivion of Chicago. As such, there’s a lot of repeated information, including snippets of banal dialogue, which tends to become tiresome. Up to the end of this first segment, where we focus on Rebecca Ferguson and Malachi Beasley in the White House Situation Room, tensions are high as we impatiently wait to see if the missile can be intercepted by an Alaska based battalion (led by Anthony Ramos who is trying to do a lot with a little screen time). We then switch to several members of this crisis management team we’d already met, the standout among them being Tracy Letts’ General, a no-nonsense STRATROOM Commander. Bickering with Gabriel Basso’s Deputy NSA representative, stepping in for his boss who is out on a medical emergency, finds them trying to influence the president’s retaliatory options, even though it’s still undetermined who launched the missile.
Lastly, we finally get a visual on Idris Elba as the president (who also played Britain’s PM this year in the forgettable Heads of State), somewhat befuddled about the plan of action, his wife away on an environmental mission in Kenya. Jared Harris, who seems to have a somewhat toxic relationship with his daughter, who lives in Chicago, is the closest we get to any kind of fussy emotional theatrics. But much like Pete Travis’ Vantage Point (2008), this witnessing of the same event from several perspectives drains the essence of immediacy. But the aim of the film is not to satisfy as a mindless action film, but to ponder the threat of our current reality. In essence, this plays like the prologue to Mick Jackson’s 1984 made-for-television horror film Threads, which deals with the effects of nuclear warfare on Sheffield, England. But if A House of Dynamite feels like a prophecy, then it’s merely akin to the cursed Greek princess, Cassandra, doomed to be ignored despite her accuracy.
Reviewed on September 2nd at the 2025 Venice Film Festival (82nd edition) – In Competition. 112 Mins.
★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
