House of the Perpetually Setting Sun

Pica has been subscribing to Netflix for the past few weeks mainly to watch the new season of “The Great British Bakeoff”, and yesterday I took advantage of the access to view the new movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow, “A House of Dynamite”. This is a nuclear war thriller about the response of the United States government to the detection of a single ICBM of unknown origin on a suborbital trajectory leaving the Pacific to strike the continental U.S. This covers a period of about 18 minutes between detection and impact, which makes for a quite short movie in real time. Bigelow’s intent in the movie is to show the reactions of the key people involved in the crisis, and she accomplishes this by following different sets of people in three different retellings of the 18 minutes. The first part follows the duty officer in the White House Situation Room (played by Rebecca Ferguson) as well as the crew of the anti-ballistic missile base in Alaska trying to shoot down the ICBM. The last part focuses on the response of the President of the United States, played by Idris Elba. Narratively I didn’t find that this structuring of the story worked well. The first portion was quite exciting, but in passes 2 and 3 it grew tedious. The strongest performance in the movie was from Rebecca Ferguson, but her story ended in the first portion.

The movie was good, not great, more didactic than memorable cinema. We certainly learn about the impossibility of communication among decision-makers under a crisis of such a short timespan, and the doubtful utility of the present-day anti-ballistic missile system (“hitting a bullet with a bullet” is the phrase they use in the movie). My favorite movie in the genre of nuclear war films still remains “Dr. Strangelove”.