It's only the end of the world: "A House of Dynamite"

Since entering the Major American Filmmaker phase of her career, Kathryn Bigelow has typically been drawn towards material that feels in some way contemporary. Released in the Internet's infancy, 1995's Strange Days was both a pulsating thriller and a cautionary fable on the dangers of spending too much time in the virtual realm; 2008's The Hurt Locker and 2012's Zero Dark Thirty took baleful looks at America's then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; 2017's Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into fractious conversation with the country's long history of racism. Brought to you in association with Netflix, Bigelow's comeback film A House of Dynamite intends to speak to a moment of increased militarisation, and more generally to a point in time where citizens across the political spectrum have started to wonder who the hell's in charge. The script, penned by former NBC News chief Noah Oppenheim, updates Fail Safe, Sidney Lumet's 1964 thriller about Cold War nuclear tensions, except the earlier film's ensemble is here atomised in a very modern way. Faced with a renewed nuclear threat, the main characters will now be given precisely nineteen minutes to think things through: the time it takes for a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific to reach its destination on the US mainland. The rogue nuke is first spotted by soldier Anthony Ramos, already having a bad day on his Alaskan base; it's phoned through to Rebecca Ferguson and Jason Clarke, manning the White House Situation Room; then passed up along the command chain to Defence Secretary Jared Harris, baseball-nut General Tracy Letts and President Idris Elba. At first, it's unclear whether the red dot on everybody's screens is a test launch, or simply the result of someone's bad maths; then the emergency alerts and shelter-in-place orders are issued, and we learn the missile in question will shortly turn the Windy City into a hole in the ground, as if that place doesn't currently have enough on its plate.

Whatever the outcome, Bigelow doubtless saw this script as another opportunity to immerse audiences in the helter-skelter of the here-and-now. Presented as a real-time procedural drama, House never lacks for ticking digital displays (see the countdown from Defcon-4 to Defcon-1 as it happens!) and spiralling handheld photography (care of Paul Greengrass favourite Barry Ackroyd). Several of the main characters have to patch into the comms feed while in transit; we quickly grasp this administration has been caught on the backfoot. In the prologue in particular, Bigelow appears to be employing a policy of temporal brinkmanship: you wonder where the film can possibly go after these opening twenty minutes, and what will happen once the clock ticks down to zero. The answer, I'm afraid, is this: it has nowhere to go. The missile doesn't fragment, but the film does: we go on to revisit those first twenty minutes - perhaps the final twenty minutes on Earth - in the company of an entirely arbitrary-seeming sample of the above characters. On paper, that's an intriguing structural wrinkle: we're essentially watching lives flashing before our eyes, while again being reminded of how fleeting life is. (Never more so when some ne'er-do-well elects to push the button.) Here, however, the film just proceeds to bog down in much the same jurisdictional and technical detail that dogged Zero Dark Thirty's progress; Oppenheim's going over the same scenario three or four times, edging us ever closer to an unimaginable climax. So unimaginable, it transpires, that the film simply stops dead at a certain point; for different reasons, both the characters and the audience are left wondering 'is that it?'

After the potent yet divisive Detroit, a defining film of the first Trump administration even as it underperformed at the box office, House shapes up as Bigelow's most dourly conventional film - and I can hardly believe I'm writing that after sitting through 2002's K-19: The Widowmaker. Volker Bertelmann's classical score underlines every emotion we're meant to feel; a hackneyed sentimental touch has Ferguson discover a toy dinosaur her sick son has left in her jacket pocket; the shockingly televisual framing (a Netflix imposition?) suggests some algorithmic levelling out of 24, The West Wing and the streamer's recent, Oppenheim-penned dud Zero Day. Is this really the same filmmaker who made Point Break and Strange Days so compelling to look at? Bigelow's newfound belief that actors plus script is enough would be curious even before she read this particular, oddly patchy screenplay, which plays to very few of her established strengths: introduced as the latest of this director's tough working women, the Ferguson character disappears entirely after the opening reel, and so - once again - it's down to frowning men to try and prevent the end of the world. It's not hard to see what's gone so desperately wrong here: this would have been one of the projects rushed into production after Oppenheimer's Oscar sweep (you can hear the elevator pitch: "what if Oppenheimer, but now?"), only to find itself completely overtaken by the recontextualising events of November 5, 2024. What the film that limps out now assumes is that those in positions of power would be trained specialists, and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from outside the United States. If previous Bigelow films felt like reflections on their moment, House - the first of this director's works to fall somewhere between distraction, afterthought and outright irrelevance - instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. The America Bigelow's film describes has already been blown to smithereens.

A House of Dynamite is now playing in selected cinemas, and streams via Netflix from October 24.