The first woman in history to win the Best Picture Academy Award delivers her first film in eight years. Her previous movie Detroit (2017) was a staunch denunciation of police brutality and institutional racism in the US. Her most successful film The Hurt Locker, which also premiered in Venice (2008) and went on to win six statuettes in 2010, examined the psychological stress that American soldiers had to endure during the United States’s illegal invasion of Iraq. In A House of Dynamite, the 73-year-old filmmaker focuses on the US government as they scramble to make decisions, just as nuclear bomb is about to hit Chicago. The Hurt Locker and A House of Dynamite have similar geopolitical ambitions. And a very questionable agenda.
Both movies are part of a lineage of films that seek to portray notorious oppressors as virtuous men and women desperately fighting for their sanity, their dignity, and to keep their country safe. These films also include, Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008) and – far more significantly – Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2022). While Folman’s film deals with Israel, the other three concentrate on the biggest military powerhouse on this planet, the United States. A House of Dynamite portrays the country that routinely wages unprovoked wars on foreign territories, and also the only nation in history to have used nuclear weapons on civilian targets (not just once but twice: in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) as a defenceless victim of an unprovoked nuclear attack, from an unidentified source.
The film opens with a title card that the nuclear race became manageable with the demise of demise of the USSR and the end of the Cold War, but that this trend has now been reversed. What follows is star-studded and very expensive movie (Netflix does not release budget figures, but a previous project by Bigelow came with a price tag of a whopping U$100 million). The story is broken down into three segments, which take place simultaneously. A nuclear weapon has been launched somewhere in the mid-Pacific, and it’s hustling towards Chicago. The US has roughly 20 minutes to stop the device before it hits the third largest city in the country and claims roughly 10 million lives. The interceptor fails and just as the bomb is about to hit the Windy City… the film cuts into the second segment, which tells exactly the same story during the same timeframe, from a different person;’s perspective. The same with the third segmet.
From a narrative point-of-view, A House of Dynamite is utterly chaotic. As if someone has detonated TNT inside the script room. The first segment is seen from the perspective of intelligence and military agents inside an enormous control room. The second one is seen from the perspective of an AI expert holidaying with her children in Nebraska, watching a reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg, a Civil War development that claimed the lives of 50,000 Americans. In the third part, the President of the United States (Idris Elba) is interrupted to deal with the imminent threat just as he attends a public event in a basketball stadium.
The problem is that various characters appear/can be heard in all three segments. As a result, each episode – instead of helping viewers to put the puzzle pieces together – throws new elements into the plot, and the film into irremediable disarray. The chaotic editing, combined with the endless acronyms (for American agencies, war terminology etc) also help to make the storyline virtually incomprehensible. The tense music that permeates the entire flick (literally from the very first second, when the Netflix logo appears) serves to irritate viewers. The characters lack depth. Perhaps except for Idris Elba, you may barely remember who Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, and many others played.
Apart from being extremely confusing and unpleasant to watch, A House of Dynamite contains subliminal messages, which are both deceitful and dangerous: Americans are perpetual victims defending themselves from deranged enemies, every geopolitical rival is to be mistrusted (and perhaps annihilated?), we live in extremely dangerous times that may justify extreme measures. The writing is on the wall: the United States could be attacked at any point, and Americans need to take preemptive measures in order to avert this. A House of Dynamite is a shoddy apologia of preemptive defence. A propaganda movie intended to convince the world that the American government is a force of good, and that they have the entitlement to take action against their perceived enemies as required.
Bigelow does briefly question the ethics of escalation and retaliation, but ultimately it’s the urge to defend the United States that prevails.
I hope that in her next movie Bigelow returns to domestic affairs, as she did to great results in Detroit. The world needs to learn about the institutional and moral failures of the Land of the Free. The last thing we need right now are alarmist war movies, silly tales of American victimisation, nationalism, and military vindication.
A House of Dynamite premiered in the Official Competition of the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. In cinemas on Friday, October 3rd. On Netflix on Monday, October 20th. To be avoided at all costs in case you value your time, your money and this planet’s security.
