As she does every morning, Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) reports for duty as the Oversight Officer of the United States Situation Room.  After being caught up to speed on the usual chatter across the prior evening, she is alerted of an incoming, rogue missile headed across the Pacific towards the continental United States.  After confirming the launch with the military, she and other government bodies – chiefly General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts), Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso), and Secretary of Defense Reid Baker (Jared Harris) – work with the President (Idris Elba) to determine what, if any, response will be made. 

For Netflix, Kathryn Bigelow directs A House of Dynamite, a 112-minute political thriller written by Noah Oppenheim.  The film premiered at in competition for the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival ahead of its awards-qualifying theatrical release with unreported box office from its allocated domestic screens before finally bowing on streaming for wide audiences at home offering some real-life scares and tension in the penultimate weekend of October ahead of the Halloween frame. 

The opening act of the film largely takes place within the Situation Room under Captain Walker, occasionally breaking out away from DC to Fort Greely, Alaska where Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) and his team frantically try to understand both how this missile  was missed by their radar systems and, in the immediate, what options they have to shoot the missile down before it breaches American air space and threatens millions of lives.  The action unfolds across a flurry of conference calls, zoom windows, and military jargon with any of the more complex abbreviations being spelled out on screen while some of the more pedestrian phrases simply being picked up by context clues.  It is a wise move on behalf of Oppenheim as to have these character explain their own jobs to each other would be jarring, so credit is due both in how he handles the incredible about of exposition necessary for this thought exercise of a film and to the cast who are speaking almost exclusively in esoteric shorthand to each other.  Additionally, Oppenheim wields office banter well, allowing these characters branch out from beyond their roles and show some personality instead of becoming caricatures of their position, or, more crudely, pieces on the chess board of geo-politics.  Mix this writing with Kirk Baxter’s edit which is able to wring every ounce of tension from again, a day at the modern office consisting of phone calls and Teams links, and A House of Dynamite boasts one of the more immediately captivating opening acts of the year and one of the few films that manages to make looking at screens on screen exciting; no easy feat given the temptation of second – third? – screening since this title will most likely be consumed at home on streaming. 

Unfortunately, when the film transitions to the second act, we realize that it is going to roll out the story through shifting perspectives, this time following the events that we just saw but now from the shared leading perspective of General Brady and Deputy Jack Birmingham.  Letts’ performance is akin to a scenery chewing villain, though his role on the page is not that of an antagonist.  Simply, he comes onto screen and no one else stands a chance to break through the gravitational pull he has on the audience as this been-around-the-block general with an old school mindset on the brink of an old school war.  It is one of the more interesting choices made on the page of A House of Dynamite, that it opts for an actual missile strike instead of a massive cyber attack.  It adds some additional danger to the action of the film simply because at its core, everyone can understand the devastating effects of a missile strike while while cyber crime exists more in the nether despite such an attack having massive consequences, too. By focusing on this more tangible idea and essentially dramatizing a protocol book, Oppenheim is able to really push his characters to the brink as they have to shelve their own human response to almost assured destruction and follow a plan which has never before been enacted outside of a testing environment. Because this film requires these characters to act as humans, it becomes a very unique film in the cannon of war films. Beyond just its clerical and eye in the sky setting, we understand that these are people with lives outside of the office and outside of their uniform, more so than just having a quick moment in the trenches to look at a picture of that gal back home; the decisions they make in their roles will have a direct impact on their lives when, or if, they go home that evening.

While we enjoy our time with Letts, we do find ourselves feeling Ferguson’s absence from the film. It is her quiet and competent gravitas which was the string that held the first act together and introduced us to all of these characters with whom we would spend the remainder of the film with, yet, unlike the rest of the cast, she is not afforded any screentime in the proceeding acts of the film beyond her own.  This is an odd choice to take on such an ensemble-hinging narrative and Oppenheim does not bring her back for a bookending sequence so we are left hanging on the open ending her story even more so than we are left hanging on everyone else.  Oppenheim seems to recognize that this is a misstep as, on the page, he tries to course correct by introducing us to Ana Park (Greta Lee), an Eastern military intelligence expert who is enjoying her day off with her son, Aidan (Ezrah Lin), watching a Battle of Gettysburg reenactment which is just about the heaviest of the many heavy handed metaphors deployed across the script.  Lee brings a similar energy to the film as Ferguson, but with less to do her presence is still welcomed even if it is not strong enough to save the film from its eventual derailment.

Finally in the third act, and already worn down, we see the same action but this time more focused through the expanded lens of Jack, and opening that narrative aperture up more to bring in Sec. Def. Reid, and the President.  It is the weakest of the three acts, and that is taking into account the added difficulty of this being the third iteration of the same forty or so minutes of narrative space which we are now well acquainted with.  Beyond that, while Ferguson and Letts brought unique and captivating energy to the screen, Elba and Harris are working on a much slower wave length that drives the energy of this iteration to a halt, though Harris’ arc is one of the more captivating ones in this section and he excels in a role that could otherwise easily swallow a less seasoned actor.  Coupled with the fact that we really do not gain any true new insight or information each time the cycle repeats itself, that they are bringing such muted energy to the screen really makes it difficult to stay invested in a story that by now we have already figured out will not have a satisfying conclusion. 

It is understandable why this film ultimately ends on an open ended note as Bigelow is a director noted in this era of her career for her accuracy and at a certain point speculation would become too fictional for her chosen themes. While it makes sense why she would bypass a traditional idea of an ending, as a film where we become connected to and attached to these characters, they all deserve a final character moment and the denial of that closure towards Ferguson’s Olivia is the one we feel the sting from most. Even if the larger plot is left ambiguous, these characters have all had arcs established and that almost none of them are returned to feels like a betrayal on behalf of Bigelow and Oppenheim of our time and our trust in them as storytellers.

A House of Dynamite is well enough put together and features a strong opening, but its slow slide into tedium really undoes any of what can be praised about the first half come time to roll the credits.  In this way, it seems almost a metaphor of Bigelow’s war and social unrest cycle as she digs deep into the corners of her same old bag of tricks, touting the gritty realism of it all is a film that, despite some changes to technology, tonally and structurally feels very much like it could have come out 15 years ago instead of her Oscar winning The Hurt Locker (2009).  Bigelow reteams with her The Hurt Locker cinematographer, Barry Ackroyd, whose handheld camera is constantly pushing around and roving about the frame, again, not having evolved in style across that decade and a half. While A House of Dynamite is far from inspiring, it is a film made by someone just a little too comfortable in their career and bordering on stagnant but bolstered by the added benefit of that same director being skilled enough that even a weak work has streaks of merit about it.  The kernels of ideas are all there, but it was not given enough time to flower into something worthwhile or as searing of a call to action a Bigelow may have imagined her cautionary tale would have been and audiences are left holding the bag waiting for one of these characters – any of them – to do something.