The 1960s had Dr Strangelove and Fail Safe, the ’70s had Twilight’s Last Gleaming, the ’80s had WarGames, and the ’90s had Crimson Tide. If you’ve recovered from those Cold War classics, Kathryn Bigelow’s unbelievably stressful nuclear disaster movie is sending you straight back to the basement.
The screenplay by TV news veteran Noah Oppenheim, who also co-wrote Netflix’s White House cyberattack thriller Zero Day and must surely have a bunker in his garden by this point, gives three overlapping perspectives on an unfolding nightmare. Each start at the exact same point: a regular morning in the White House Situation Room and US Strategic Command is disrupted by a spec on the radar. A single nuke has been launched over the Pacific. Is it another North Korean test? A rogue submarine commander? Nothing to worry about or the first shot of armageddon?
A faint worry becomes palpable fear for Admiral Mark Miller (Jason Clarke), Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) and the team in the Situation Room when the nuke goes ‘suborbital’, its trajectory putting it on course to hit the Midwest in 17 minutes time. At Alaska’s missile defence base, Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) goes from wrestling with homesickness to trying to prevent ten million fatalities in a trice. But, as someone points out, America’s $60 billion defence missiles are like trying to ‘hit a bullet with a bullet’.
Over the world’s most high-powered Zoom call, the President (Idris Elba) and his advisors wrestle with whether or not to retaliate – and against whom. Russia and China aren’t answering the phone, and US satellites missed the point of launch, possibly due to a cyberattack. Billions of lives hang in the balance.
You’ll come away wondering if we’ve all lost our minds
Those first 40-odd minutes are unbearably tense. Ferguson is a standout in a strong ensemble cast as a well-drilled professional straining to hold it together as senior staffers start getting escorted to the White House bunker and her husband and sick kid remain unreachable somewhere in DC.
The following two chapters run it all back – this time in the shoes of Tracy Letts’ nuclear arsenal commander, Jared Harris’s unravelling Secretary of Defense, Moses Ingram’s emergency response chief, Gabriel Basso’s national security advisor, Greta Lee’s defence analyst, and finally the President and the naval officer (Jonah Hauer-King) who accompanies him with the ‘nuclear football’. It’s satisfying to find little details from the early chapters – the President’s lack of video access on the call, a mysterious crash on the line – gaining fresh context. Elba is solid in his second ‘world leader’ role of the year, after the immeasurably wackier Heads of State, although the final stretch lacks the piano-wire tautness of what came before.
Bigelow and her The Hurt Locker cinematographer Barry Ackroyd find moments of frailty and fear as these highly-drilled professionals grapple with what it all means for their families and the compatriots. They’ve all role-played this situation, but no one is really prepared for it. And when the President is handed a binder full of retaliatory strike options, it’s like he’s being asked to order a nice Bordeaux from a wine list. You’ll come away wondering if we’ve all lost our minds.
A House of Dynamite premiered at the Venice Film Festival. In select cinemas Oct 10 and on Netflix Oct 24.