The filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow has used her knack for tension to drive home the urgency of a host of social issues: race-based police brutality, the murkiness of guerrilla warfare, the ethical limits of intelligence gathering.
On Sunday night at the New York Film Festival, the Oscar-wining director unleashed her latest weightily-themed white-knuckler, premiering nuclear-crisis thriller A House of Dynamite in North America after its rapturous screening in Venice earlier this month.
Like her meisterwork, the 2010 Oscar juggernaut The Hurt Locker, Bigelow’s new film is as much moral puzzle as narrative coddler. For the upcoming Netflix release, Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim used her technique of radical, jittery immersion to imagine — and challenge — geopolitical realities we often skate past.
“We are trying to ask a bigger question,” Oppenheim said from the stage after the screening. “Is this the reality we want to be living in?”
That reality, as Bigelow reminded the audience, is a tinderbox: some 12,000 active nuclear warheads now exist across the storehouses of at least nine countries. The match Bigelow and Oppenheim light in it is an out-of-nowhere strike launched from somewhere in the the Pacific toward Middle America, its author unknown.
What follows might be described as Rashomon by way of 24: the same real-time 18 minutes of incoming-missile terror told from three different perspectives of the U.S. political-military machine including the president (Idris Elba), all camps grappling with the matter of how to retaliate. It is a question as impossible as it is urgent: drop a bomb on the wrong (or even right) country and a catastrophic escalation could ensue; do nothing, though, and you could be inviting further attacks.
“It started with a what-if question,” Bigelow said. “We’re living in a very volatile world,” she added. “That calculus made me feel vulnerable, and I wanted to dig down into it.”
Watching so many authority figures in the movie grapple with the impossible leads a viewer to wait for the arrival of someone who knows just what to do — before we hit the realization that these are those people, and they don’t. “It’s a reminder of how the system functions; it’s not run by a computer or AI or a book but by people,” said the veteran actor Tracy Letts, who plays a general as flummoxed by the situation as anyone else.
The film marks Bigelow’s first in more than two decades without her longtime screenwriter Mark Boal (they worked together on Detroit, Zero Dark Thirty and Hurt Locker). Oppenheim, the former president of NBC News (and the writer of political entertainmens like Jackie), had expertise on the matter of nuclear preparedness, and both he and Bigelow spent months talking to past and current U.S. officials about the emergency decision-tree that would follow if experts detected an incoming missile. The movie both comes in the tradition of, and calculates realities that didn’t exist with, Cold War cinematic staples like Fail Safe, Dr. Strangelove and The Day After. Bigelow herself previous swam in nuclear waters with 2002’s period dramatic thriller K-19: The Widowmaker, though is a lot more interested here in the future, or the pesky matter of whether there will be one.
Dynamite arrives in U.S. theaters Oct 10 before debuting on Netflix two weeks later. The movie could draw comparisons to Paul Greengrass’ California-wildfire drama The Lost Bus, also a real-time thriller about a topical subject hitting streaming next month (Apple TV+).
Like other Bigelow geopolitical works (both Zero Dark and Hurt Locker were nominated for best picture, with Hurt Locker winning), the film also instantly finds itself an awards front-runner. Bigelow’s well-known ability to progressively intensify a crisis in real time — think of the harrowing minutes of the police-led assault in a Michigan home in Detroit or the unfolding assassination of Osama Bin Laden in the last section of Zero Dark Thirty – already made the film a spellbinder to the 1,100 people who packed Alice Tully Hall late Sunday night, though it remains to be seen how a mass streaming audience or awards voters will react to the film’s principled reluctance to attempt answers to many of the questions it poses.
Even more pressing is how the film will activate in a world where nuclear tensions continue to rise on the Korean Peninsula, Russia still occupies a nuclear power plant in Ukraine and U.S. president Donald Trump tells the United Nations that “the only thing that solves war and wars is action.”
Bigelow’s impact on collective political thinking is virtually unmatched among mainstream Hollywood directors. Zero Dark forced a reckoning with enhanced-interrogation techniques (even as it also inadvertently wandered into a political thicket) while Hurt Locker cast new light into the minds of soldiers back from the country’s forever wars. Even Detroit, though undoubtedly divisive, seemed once again ahead of a national conversation that would ensue three years later with another instance of race-based police brutality in the Midwest with George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis.
The director has high ambitions here too. “My hope,” Bigelow said of her new film, is that it can “encourage conversation about reducing the nuclear stockpile. That would be the optimal outcome.”
New York Film Festival artistic director Dennis Lim told the audience that those hoping for a hug or respite might want to look elsewhere. “Some films function as escapism; they make you forget the world you’re living in,” Lim said before the screening. “This is not that kind of movie.” The audience laughed, then a few hours later, its minds and anxieties provoked, spilled out into the warm September air a little heavier for the wear.