You ever watch a movie or Tv show where everything feels too good to be true; the plot is engaging, characters are dynamic enough to be considered above two dimensional, technical values reflect the environmental situation unfolding and with a story that absolutely has every element and tool available to keep you hooked….only for that very ambition (and a controversial ending) to work against itself and effectively ground all that goodwill into paste?
“A House of Dynamite” tries so hard to avoid that pitfall but ends up sleepwalking into it anyways through no fault of its own.
Kathryn Bigelow, revered for her work on The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, does her damnedest to shape and warp every scene she directs with this matter-of-fact control room immediacy. For her first film back in eight years, her journalistic penchant to take a series of hypotheticals and render them into narrative actuality is the only out-and-out solid thing about this feature, even if it traps her in a more artificial coating that she has to dance around to boost it up to her level
Every facet of this production design roots itself in manufacturing believable workplace environments, sampling the syntax of a docudrama transforming regular locations to heighten immersion; its a valid effort that I’d be more inclined to sing praise to if they didn’t feel so maddingly obtuse. It took me about half an hour into this to realize how much the scope of the horrors in this movie feel beyond comprehension and often don’t compliment the gargantuan scale of this thriller, dumbing down this vast vision with peculiar detatchment. With that, the limitations of us being a supposed global superpower carry this restless industrial hum that quickly fades, no matter how much immaculate the D.C. production design it comes packaged with is.
All of this speaks towards a linear presentation actively fighting the attempted non-linear structure and struggling to gaslight you into thinking it isn’t linear; the damn three-part structure feels too segmented to shift or warp that gimmicky packaging. Barry Ackroyd’s cinematography and Kirk Baxter’s editing want to stimulate that condensed pressure cooker, weighing in on geopolitical reality using this cinema-sized canvas as a makeshift Floor is Lava; it understands the inherent angst in the sterility of this architecture yet above average framing and constant crash-in zooming fully relay a claustrophobic, boxed-in atmosphere.
Really, most of the technical elements here are anchored at the hip with as many confounding asterisks as positive exclamations. For such slow-burn down-to-the-wire pacing, it can’t maintain and offset that momentum for an hour and half (let alone two hours), the runtime only just offsets said pacing and rhythm accordingly, however, to where the length doesn’t drag on, tension that starts off claustrophobic and with briskly accelerated stakes quickly whimper and stumps itself and the tone is equal parts chilling, sobering and stupid in how it juggles all of its components; although I supposed the slapdashery is the entire point because in a situation like this, it’s meant to catch you off-balance and observe how everyone is assured to respond differently.
At least the musical score is enthralling with its minimalism, Volker Bertelsmann’s combination of broad violin strokes, timbre and wavelengths skirting on portentous with how much it’s used. Paul N.J Ottosson’s sound design proved to be only just competent, I can’t recall much of the costume design and for what I believe to be a R rating, its a pretty tame use of the rating especially when there’s very little explicit violence or gore, only settling for constant F-bombs.
Can’t help feeling like a badge of artistic restraint.
There’s a lot that I want to like about this ensemble. I understand the intention behind leaving everyone as a blank slate and much of the parceled exposition and dialogue about entrenched protocol feels surprisingly natural but they’re all delivered by characters who have the personality of drying paint (the most generic, stock, cliched placeholders replicated amongst a sea of otherwise vacant vessels). I can’t think of any one performance that stands out more than the other; it’s easy to see they’re all understanding the assignment and doing their best but between Rebecca Ferguson’s quiet magnetism and Idris Elba not sure how to portray this laid-back POTUS, they’d not exactly a high bar to clear.
Sometimes I love it when a narrative operates on a ticking timer or metronome; framing the entire DEFCON plot primer as this race against ambiguity from the outside looking in and chasing its entertainment value with a sick feeling of dread. Many of the moving parts are in place and the story does just enough orienting us within the recursive chronology to catch us up to speed with who does what to whom and when. It’s oddly self-aware enough to know to keep the action firmly on those making the tough decisions and appealing both to the audience’s intelligence and reason. One-note, basic setups aside, the intrigue comes from not knowing all the logistics behind the whom, what and how leading up to certain disaster and having to act on pure panic and one of the great ironies about this scenario playing out is even people personally and yearly trained to combat a situation like this aren’t immune from falling apart when the fantasy becomes an ugly reality.
Yeah, I know this very story of a United States grappling with an existential threat coming from outside its borders feels curiously anachronistic especially in light of current events unfolding WITHIN our borders but even when the bare minimum is executed to envision a world where deterrence has, inexplicably, failed, it still hits a relatively addictive high when the choice is “strike to prevent catastrophe and risk starting another war or do nothing and risk cities being evaporated”, assuring people are going to die no matter what.
That very same structural hook, however, quickly comes back to bite the story in the ass multiple times over. Unlike films like Vantage Point, Rashomon, Weapons, Bullet Train, Pulp Fiction etc which uses their flower narrative style to hide away and then reveal puzzle pieces to add new layers to flesh out the full story, we’re left with a narrative that constantly hits the replay button every thirty minutes, preventing the very film structure itself from planting its roots and developing beyond a fixed portrait in time. Depressurization results in the script getting in Bigelow’s way more often than it does in her previous films, and unlike Civil War, actively feels like its spinning its wheels and taking Lifetime cues like we’re in an after school special.
Each perspective fails to wield any of the script’s supposed weight like an electric baton, getting stuck in its own geopolitical importance like a malfunctioning tumble-drier and actively backing out on following through on those stakes. Narrowing the movies focus doesn’t elevate the drama in this instance and since there’s no tight grip on cause-and-effect to warrant all three acts feeling exactly the same, the excessive looping not only ends up diluting and negating the tension once expertly applied, but it kills the pacing too. It’s repetitive by design because said narrative threadlines are nothing but premise and while I can applaud it for not tantalizing us with this as a distraction, such a fatal misjudgment ends up relegating an otherwise gripping anxiety-induced crisis into a pernicious form of American exceptionalism—one specially designed to make us feel pessimistic and abstract at once in its execution, especially when its entire nuclear weapons framing device gradually gets put on the back-burner and carries itself with the mindset of a stuck-up liberal wanting to speak to the incompetency of the American government while having a fictional, underwritten Black president.
Movies like Vantage Point and Fail Safe do much better at stripping apart the ridiculousness of the complex systems and protocols that we people put between one another as a means for comfort while depicting the hubris and viciousness of certain individuals involved. This one only feigns and raises lip service at those urgent themes without committing to the bit.
But of course, that’s not what intrigues you. Nah, you wanna see what I think of that ending, right? To be fully transparent, I’m torn. Realistically, I don’t mind how abruptly it ends, denying us catharsis in an impossible situation painting itself to where no catharsis can be reached. There is no scenario where a situation about NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION would ever end with a nice little bow and everything goes back to being hunky-dory. But then again, considering how the entire movie basically builds up this jumbo world-altering threat by repeating the same scenario over and over again from vastly different angles, only to then blue-ball you out of getting any answers anyway and leave us stuck in limbo?
Look, some movies work better when we don’t know how everything wraps up. But this situation feels too grounded and so close to home NOT to feel cheated out of wanting some closure.
“A good story poorly told” is the last thing I expected to brand a Kathryn Bigelow movie but considering its inflated self-importance, its high-handed cop-out ending and the static nature of the situation precluding Bigelow from executing the kinetic, large-scale apocalyptic spectacles she’s best known for, I can definitely see where those arguments come from now matter how absorbing the first half hour is.
