Review of 'A House of Dynamite'

I grew up in a world in which Dr. Strangelove was a plausible movie, a world in which we lived with the Soviet Union, armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, as were we, and our best chance that we wouldn't blow up the Earth, if not to smithereens, to an uninhabitable planet, was MAD -- the mutually assured destruction that a nuclear war would engender, which would stop we human beings from ever starting such a no-win war.

As A House of Dynamite on Netflix tells us, at the beginning, we the world gradually learned to scale down our armaments, but the world has gone back to at least verbal apocalyptic belligerence in the past decade, with Russia, in particular, refusing to rule out nuclear weapons if the US and NATO attacked it in response to the Russian attack on Ukraine, or maybe if we gave Ukraine too much assistance.

[Spoilers ahead ... ]

A House of Dynamite posits such world in which a missile is launched towards the United States. Attempts to intercept it with our missiles unaccountably fail. Maybe our defense system has been compromised by prior surreptitious cyber attacks. Maybe the system wasn't that effective in the first place. We’re told that stopping a missile like that is like “a bullet hitting a bullet”.

We soon learn that Chicago is the target. (Here I'll say that the movie was made before Trump unconstitutionally targeted Chicago for National Guard deployment. Just sayin'.) We see this story play out from three different simultaneous angles, from the standpoints of American military and political leaders and personnel. The actors are top notch: Idris Elba as US President (he's been great in everything I've seen since Stringer Bell in The Wire), Jared Harris as Secretary of Defence (Hari Seldon in Foundation), and Rebecca Ferguson as a Captain who finds herself heading the White House Situation Room (Juliette Nichols in Silo), are just three of many examples.

All three stories end with the missile seconds from hitting Chicago, and the President struggling to make a decision. Retaliate? Against which country? Russia, China, North Korea? And what kind of retaliation -- how much of the presumed enemy will be destroyed? How much of the Earth will be left inhabitable?

And here the movie ends. Right. Just like the last scene of The Sopranos. We the audience need to fill in the ending. Or at least think about it. Is this good movie-making? I actually thought it worked great in The Sopranos (see my reviews, beginning here, for what I think happened to Tony). But The Sopranos was clearly a totally fictitious story about familiar characters in our reality. A House of Dynamite is fiction, too, but somehow seems less a fiction, much closer to our reality, the world I grew up in, the world we now inhabit.

And as a denizen of that world, I found the ending unsatisfying. But maybe in such a scenario there is no narratively satisfying ending. A happy ending would have been the missile hitting Chicago with no bomb, or no bomb going off. Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (played by Gabriel Basso, who believe it or not played J. D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy) tells the President this a possibility, in an attempt to caution him not to launch a massive nuclear counter-strike. This of course goes against the military advice of General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts, Elvis and Nixon -- hey, it's a movie about a President).

So who would the President listen to? I'd hope it would be Baerington not Brady. But maybe that's not realistic, after all.

The Hollywood Reporter says the real Pentagon, our current Pentagon, in real life not on the screen, didn't like the movie. That in itself makes it worthwhile to see A House of Dynamite.