A House of Dynamite - Some thoughts

I've long believed that in my lifetime, the world will witness the detonation of a nuclear weapon.

Depending on the year, my opinion has varied on whether this will take the form of an accident or intentional use. This opinion goes back at least to post-9/11 when the Daisy Cutter & MOAB bombs were being dropped in attempt to smoke out insurgents in caves and bunkers. They were enormous weapons and for a brief time there were stories and chatter (via early internet comment sections) about how these were "mini nukes" which betrays a staggering ignorance of math and history that shocked me at the time. What I took from that moment was just how profound the loss of generational knowledge about how truly horrific and powerful nuclear weapons really are. The Baby Boomers grew up in the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and experienced the Cuban Missile Crisis. Their children (Gen X, mostly) grew up in the later Cold War era with grandparents who had been alive when the first atomic bombs were dropped and experienced the era of Reagan's saber-rattling and bellicose rhetoric along with some pop monoculture artifacts that were unsparing in how truly devastating nuclear war would be. (The Day After, Testament, Threads).

The point is that the Boomers and Gen X both had personal contact with people (Silent Gen and earlier) that were alive when those first bombs dropped and then lived through some formative periods to further reinforce the apocalyptic nature of the threat. Millenials really only have 3rd hand "experience" through their parents and grandparents and not nearly as many pop culture works that highlighted nuclear war. Terminator 2's visceral sequence is from 1992 and the ambivalently received Sum of All Fears was 2002). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the threat of nuclear war has somewhat faded from the cultural landscape. The loss of a monoculture that allowed a TV movie like The Day After to become such a phenomenon seems to have been a factor as well.)

Thus, the release of A House of Dynamite has drawn my interest in two ways. First, as perhaps a cultural moment where Americans again consider how dangerous these weapons are despite all the planning and safeguards. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Putin's subsequent unsubtle threats about using nuclear weapons has possibly elevated the threat in a few more minds in the US but it doesn't feel like concern ever rose to the level of the 80s and definitely not the era of Berlin & Cuba. The second way is simply as a person who has enjoyed the wide gamut of films from Fail Safe to War Games to Spies Like Us where nuclear weapons feature either front and center or as a plot point. How does it stack up both as entertainment and as arms control propaganda?

It must be mentioned that A House of Dynamite hews very closely to the first portion of Annie Jacobsen's Nuclear War: A Scenario in that it starts with a "bolt from the blue" attack. Also, it should be obvious - SPOILERS FOLLOW!!

The movie itself then. I have to start with the acting. Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson and Jared Harris are all terrific actors. And they are mostly good in this, EXCEPT that every one of them slips a few times and their native non-American accents sneak through. I thought about this a bit and of the three, I can only really think of Idris Elba convincingly playing an American character (Stringer in The Wire). Jared Harris has been incredible in everything from Mad Men to the Expanse but he always was able to use his English accent. Rebecca Ferguson has driven me insane in Silo with her constantly shifting (Scot/Swedish?) accent but that same quirk is put to terrific use in Dune. But in a tense thriller with characters that should be solidly American, the accent slips are jarring and really pull you out of the moment. Jason Clarke and Greta Lee are both excellent in their smaller roles.

On to the plot and construction. There are two choices that the movie really hinges on. The choice of launch origin and weapon and then the revealed target. One works well enough, the other less so.

First, the SLBM launched from the western Pacific. If the weapon had been a coastal launch from a sub, the flight time is simply not long enough for the movie. Would it make more sense for a bolt from the blue sneak attack to be a submarine launch? Yes. Can it work in the context of a film that needs a certain run time to provide exposition, establish characters and still have the tick-tock framework? I would argue no, and a little dramatic license is fine. Additionally, the movie wants to address the ground-based interceptors (GBI) in Alaska and so the missile needs to fly over that area. Whatever the current government’s claims, their accuracy in the film is portrayed correctly. They have never been consistently successful, even in highly controlled tests, never mind “pop quizzes.” They simply can’t be counted on. Finally, by not using a ground launched ICBM, the attacker is deliberately shrouded and so it keeps the narrative from getting stuck on a specific enemy. All in all, I think this works.

The choice of Chicago is also quite interesting, and I’m not sure it was the best option. It removes the urgency a bit in that the single missile is not going to be a decapitation attack on D.C. Further, the principal characters are no longer personally up against the clock because they aren’t going to be incinerated in 19 minutes. This also has implications for the narrative in ways that I don’t think hold up well on reflection. Chicago, for all its importance to the US, is NOT the nerve center of any government or military apparatus. Why is POTUS feeling under the gun to launch so quickly A) without knowing the attack’s origin, B) knowing that this single SLBM is not going to decapitate the US government and C) as the deputy NatSecAdvisor puts it, there is a non-zero chance the bomb fizzles or might even be a conventional warhead. At the end of the countdown when we hear “My orders are…” and knowing the above, it begs the question of why nuclear counterstrike orders are being issued at all.

Ultimately, I think that’s part of the reason why the abrupt and ambiguous ending has so rankled random internet shouters and some critics. Yes, there are many people for whom a nice & neat conclusion is a requirement and they will never be satisfied with anything else. They should generally be ignored. However, that kind of ambiguity needs to be earned (e.g. A History of Violence) and I’m not sure this movie has because of the aforementioned unknown attacker and the target being Chicago. The question left open is: will POTUS order a nuclear counterstrike? But, ignored is the “why” and the narrative has not sufficiently provided background or justification for that.

Which brings me to what I hoped this movie might achieve: increasing awareness of the elemental, destructive power of nuclear weapons and the systems that have been put in place that are, in the end, operated by fallible humans. While The Day After was a success in getting Americans to think a bit about the nuclear war machine, I don’t think this movie will have the same effect. It’s just not well-enough constructed and is too narrowly focused on the systems and their potential failings. It might have been interesting to have a companion movie that starts right from the moment of the strike. A House of Dynamite was never going to have the cultural impact that The Day After had simply because the media landscape is far too fragmented for that. But it could have been – and needed to be – better to be effective in getting the general populace to get their heads out of their siloed social media feeds and engaged with the fact that we have a system set up that allows one person (no matter how senile, egotistic, or demented) full control of the nuclear forces.