A House of Dynamite (2025, Kathryn Bigelow)

52/100

You know what I blame this on the diminishing of? Returns.

Knew zilch going in (per usual with must-see festival films) and was riveted by the entire first section, which I didn't realize until a character spoke those words aloud bears the title "Inclination Is Flattening." (Don't place your chapter titles immediately following—and make them look exactly like—your expository text, filmmakers.) As someone who never wanted United 93 to leave the air-traffic control center, I'm the ideal viewer for quietly frantic deliberations among seasoned professionals who never actually thought they'd experience a crisis of such magnitude; Noah Oppenheim's award-winning Jackie screenplay didn't impress me at all, but here he's profitably restricted himself to extremely direct, pragmatic communication, with even this scenario's obligatory personal aspects having been carefully thought through (e.g., Walker initially being unable to reach her husband because her cell phone's locked in a secure compartment outside the Situation Room and calls to him from within come up as an unknown number, which he of course ignores). Bigelow expertly builds tension while juggling a gaggle of military and civilian figures attempting to Work The Problem People while struggling to repress their awareness of 10 million or more impending deaths should they fail, and since the countdown to oblivion starts at only 19 minutes and proceeds in something close to real time, I assumed that Dynamite, like Fail-Safe before it, would allow the unthinkable to happen. But much earlier in the movie this time. Then what? Does it become an American Threads?! Timer reaches zero, cut to black...

...and suddenly we're in the Civil War, judging from a dude on horseback in Confederate gray. (Or maybe it was Union blue. Clearly a Civil War uniform and 19th-century grooming, anyway.) Oh, I briefly thought, guess it's gonna be several "house of dynamite" situations from throughout history. That seemed potentially interesting, but fakeout! (We get another when the third section opens in Kenya, where the First Lady's on safari or something.) It's just an annual Gettysburg re-enactment, and we're still in the midst of that nuclear-crisis story. Except, no, turns out we're back at the beginning of that nuclear-crisis story, re-experiencing those same ~25 minutes from various other perspectives (with a great deal of overlap). Does this approach provide additional exciting and/or illuminating insight? Sadly, it does not. We really don't learn much of anything from part two that wasn't abundantly clear, or at least quite strongly suggested/implied, during part one. When this happened a third time (now focusing on the previously unseen but frequently heard POTUS—a strangely lackluster performance by Idris Elba), I finally realized that House of Dynamite kept rewinding not due to any true creative impulse but simply because the speed with which a nuke travels impeded Oppenheim and Bigelow's desire to stick exclusively with real time decision-making. Can't stretch that process out to feature length without either lying about how long the missile would take to reach its target or repeating events from another angle. Many of you reading this will be too young to have seen Mike Figgis' four-quadrant single-shot crapfest Timecode (can't imagine people are still watching it today), but for those who remember, imagine that it'd been more like half an hour long, and that each of its four corners/shots, rather than unfolding simultaneously in split screen, had been shown consecutively. Honestly don't think those who'll see this film on Netflix would lose anything of value by simply turning it off at the first sharp cut to black.

(Also, my apologies to Rebecca Ferguson, who gives the movie's strongest performance but who I mistook for Kerry Condon the entire time. Apparently that's not at all uncommon, which makes me feel a little better.)