Fail Safe: A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE

In A House of Dynamite, director Kathryn Bigelow brings the procedural precision of her War on Terror films The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty to a hypothetical doomsday scenario. In tensely believable scenes of people staring at monitors and tapping on keyboards and frantically setting up phone calls, we see a scarily workaday picture of how the end might arrive. As the movie begins, a nuclear warhead of unknown origin has been launched toward America. The whole security apparatus springs into action, tracking the object, attempting to intercept it, tracing its origin, planning potential retaliation, and, finally, bracing for the worst. It’s a vision of competence in the face of the inexplicable and cataclysmic, contingencies planned for since the Cold War suddenly defrosted and put to use. Bigelow marshals a large cast of talented, dependable actors whose very presence denotes professionalism. We check in at the White House Situation Room with Rebecca Ferguson and Jason Clarke, in the oval office with Idris Elba, with high-ranking officer Tracy Letts and cabinet official Jared Harris, and at FEMA with Moses Ingram. The cast expands as the options narrow. There’s something uniquely suspenseful about watching people who we believe to be thoroughly knowledgable and totally capable growing frightened as the implications settle into their faces. 

Bigelow has such a firm grasp of tone to keep things tense and tenable that it is a shame it doesn’t add up to more. She here deploys the typical modern signifiers of Hollywood verisimilitude: handheld camera, spontaneous movement, tumbling jargon. The actors are all crisp and clear. It’s all pleasingly convincing on the surface, although the political context of its release in this turbulent 2025 has with it a kind of disbelief or alternate reality feeling. I watched these rooms of professionals calmly and reasonably and thoughtfully respond to a crisis with the awareness that rooms like these don’t look like this now. Imagine the current president, and cabinet officials, and advisors in this situation and the cold sweat induced by the premise grows even colder. That said, the movie is ultimately a disappointment, not for this disjunction alone, but for the movie’s ultimate lack of a conclusion. The movie is three first acts in search of ending. Noah Oppenheim's screenplay takes us to a cataclysmic climactic point and then doubles back to show us a different perspective and then goes back again a third time. We never get past that moment of peak suspense, and each trip through the same beats is actually diminishing returns, never meaningfully adding to the scenario since many actors and key lines repeat anyway. Then the intention to leave us in doubt certainly plays a part in drawing out a political statement about the dangers of nuclear proliferation, but it’s all The Day Of with nary a hint toward The Day After, which gives the movie a big deflating lack of impact or release. It’s a lot of expert suspense with nothing in the end to say about its ideas.