A House of Dynamite is Kathryn Bigelow's Frighteningly Plausible Political Thriller and Nuclear Warning

The world lives on the brink of nuclear apocalypse every day, every night. With nine nations possessing a nuclear arsenal individually capable of wiping out a large part of humanity in a few hours, not to mention the chain reaction, retaliations, and possible global escalation, it is not a hypothetical question, but dramatically real.

Yet the nuclear threat at the heart of A House of Dynamite seems somehow dated, the related fears belonging to the Cold War era and crumbling with the Berlin Wall in 1989. If once ordinary people in the two blocs into which the world was divided dealt with atomic anxiety, knew what to do in case of escalation (even if in the face of a nuclear device you don't save yourself by sheltering under a desk as for earthquakes), today this concern is non-existent, superseded by a myriad of different, more "modern" anxieties. Yet it is not, and indeed: with the proliferation of such dangerous devices and their increase, we live more and more in a house packed with dynamite.

The Nuclear Danger is Now: Bigelow's Warning

Rational, lucid, tense, and detached like her cinema, Kathryn Bigelow returns eight years after Detroit to remind us exactly this. She does so with a political thriller penned by Noah Oppenheim (who had already written the beautiful Jackie, dealing with American political disillusionment) and produced by Netflix, which is the natural child, the logical consequence of her entire body of work. All of Bigelow is in A House of Dynamite, both in her stylistic signature and in her modus operandi, but above all in the urgency with which she tells something she cares about without emotion ever taking over.

Divided into three macro-acts, the film tells of a morning like any other that transforms into a steep descent towards a military point of no return. A missile is launched from somewhere in the Pacific Ocean towards the United States, undetected by American security systems. Slowly, the gravity of the situation becomes undeniable. Given the speed of events, nothing is certain, but the hypotheses are plausible, the reconstruction realistic, and the credible prospects annihilate the viewer. The warhead is likely nuclear, probably launched by the North Korean regime, but there are no certainties. What is certain is that a countdown of just sixteen minutes is triggered, and in this very short time, very few people will have to make decisions that will change the fate of millions of American citizens and human beings, if not directly human extinction.

Those familiar with Bigelow's cinema know that she is not an author prone to hyperbole. The film's genius lies precisely in the fact that it immediately becomes clear that the point is not so much the nuclear warhead, the enemy, or the characters under tension, but the snapshot of how easily one could slide into a situation like the one depicted. Prepared personnel who have never faced similar crises suddenly find themselves having to choose whether to call home, go to bunkers, try to track down foreign counterparts, and curb escalation. It's a nightmare situation that we retrace again and again, from different points of view.

Bigelow has no protagonists; she loves ensemble cinema with competent, prepared characters, but absolutely ordinary in their human and emotional reactions. So we jump from soldiers at an Alaskan base who find themselves for the first time attempting to intercept the nuclear warhead (whose difficulty is similar to "hitting a bullet with a bullet"), to White House situation room personnel who go from preparing the morning presidential brief to trying to contact the Russians and Chinese to stop preventive escalation, passing through the Pentagon and then up, up, up, to the President of the United States. A man who is handed a chromatically coded manual and asked if and how to attack, who, and with how many warheads.

This is perhaps the most powerful passage of a film that, in less than two hours, goes from focusing on the tragedy of the annihilation of an American metropolis to asking a man "who is more prepared for the disappearance of a Supreme Court justice than for managing the nuclear codes briefcase" to decide between stasis (a surrender that would make America weak, exposed to attacks from an uncertain enemy) and suicide. Even before the missile strikes, even before discovering if it's a sophisticated attack by one or more foreign powers or the work "of a submarine captain left by his wife who lost his mind," to ensure the survival of some American population centers (Washington is already given up for lost by everyone, especially those in the city), one must decide whether to strike the enemy (yes, but which one?) to neutralize its offensive potential, hoping that beyond the undetected base or submarine from which the attack originated, there are no other surprises.

A House of Dynamite has no political or moral lessons to give; it does not describe unprepared or incapable people managing the situation (even if the emotional impact of events makes many waver) and is precisely for this reason terrifying. In its lucid, realistic analysis, it reminds us that our tranquility regarding the nuclear problem is the most irrational and inexplicable element of this story, because it only takes one unintercepted missile, a technical error, a desperate move by a regime under pressure to trigger that chain that leads prepared people, yet far from having a complete picture of the situation, to make decisions that put the very survival of humanity on the scales. If it were melodramatic, shouted, if it showed generals profusely sweating while shouting incomprehensible orders, it would be less distressing than it is in its quiet, chilling tension.