Genre: Thriller
Premise: Told in real-time from three different perspectives, the United States Defense Department tries to stop a mysterious nuclear missile launch heading towards Chicago (why you gotta take out my home town, Hollywood!?)
About: Screenwriter Noah Oppenheim started out by writing YA movies such as The Maze Runner and Divergent. He then segued into serious fare with Jackie. This seemed to get his appetite whet for some politics, so he developed the interesting failure that was Zero Day, with Robert DeNiro. He then wrote this script which, no pun intended, blew Katheryn Bigelow away.
Writer: Noah Oppenheim
Details: 112 minutes
My original plan was to watch and review the most art housey art house movie ever, Bugonia. But then I realized that less than three of you will ever see the movie. So, I instead decided to review the much more accessible Netflix Oscar contender, A House of Dynamite.
To start off, Katheryn Bigelow is an underrated director. James Cameron’s former girlfriend has directed some really cool movies. So much so that you wonder why she continues to be overlooked and underappreciated.
Part of it may be the subject matter she chooses. Both Zero Dark Thirty and Detroit just didn’t have any appeal beyond curious Hollywood folk. That’s the curse when you become an “Oscar” director, like Bigelow became after The Hurt Locker. Is you start making choices that you think the Oscar people will like rather than making movies you want to make.
Generally speaking, when you’re chasing audiences, whether that be the casual everyday moviegoer or the uptight Academy member, you write bad stories. You’re always going to be more passionate about the things that you personally want to explore. And the more passionate you are about those things, the more you’re going to pour into your screenplay.
Where House of Dynamite lies on that spectrum for Bigelow, I don’t know. What I do know is that I like the concept. What I always tell you guys is to pick a concept that feels new or fresh. And fresh can be something old *IF* there have been no movies covering that subject matter for a long time.
It’s been forever since we’ve gotten a nuclear war movie. So the concept itself feels fresh.
Now, you can stop there if you want. Just come up with something that’s new or that we haven’t seen in forever. BUT if you want to supercharge your movie idea, look for an unexpected point of view. That takes your story and elevates it even higher because you’re further creating something unique.
That’s what House of Dynamite did. It’s a nuclear war story told from the specific point of view of war rooms – the places where these giant world-altering decisions are being made. And what’s cool about Dynamite is it added TWO MORE variables that helped it stand out. One, it told the story in real-time. And two, it divided the story into three separate segments, which restarted the timer for each one.
If you haven’t seen the film yet, the plot here is pretty straight-forward. A nuclear missile is launched from somewhere on the other side of the world. Nobody can pinpoint where. All they know is that, in 19 minutes, it’s probably going to hit somewhere in the United States.
The structure is then divided into three real-time segments. The first segment deals with the low-level techy workers whose job it is to figure out what’s going on and defend against it, probably with their own set of missiles.
The second segment, which pushes us back to the beginning of the launch, bumps us up to the actual United States Defense Department. This includes the big dogs, like the Secretary of Defense. These guys are not just ordering the underlings about what to do. They’re communicating with other nations and trying to determine who launched the missile.
Finally, we get to the third segment, which also pushes us back to the beginning of the launch. This final segment is all about the president of the United States, who is pulled from a public appearance and must decide, in the 19 minutes between getting pulled and getting to a safe location, how to respond to this threat.
All right, so, what did I think?
Before I get into that, I have to say that I am not afraid of nuclear war at all. Anybody who follows UFO chatter knows that aliens have shut down dozens of nuclear facilities in the past. The aliens are here to make sure we don’t blow ourselves up. If anyone launches a missile, they’ll take care of it – I PROMISE YOU.
Okay, now that I’ve got that out of the way. This movie, which doesn’t seem to care about aliens for some reason, WAS AWESSOOOMMMMME…
…
…
For exactly two-thirds of its running time.
I was pulled into the movie immediately. It’s got a great hook. A missile has been launched. They don’t know where from, potentially because one of their satellites covering the area was hacked.
And then we just go through the real-life system of how America deals with this threat. And that system is terrifying. That’s where all the tension lies. Running a country with this sophisticated of a defense network means there are all these little checkpoints that need to be hit, and the whole time you’re thinking, “Well, wait. We should put the president himself on the fucking phone and have him call everyone to de-escalate this!” The fact that that’s not part of the protocol is infuriating. Instead, you’re putting the lives of 8 billion people in the hands of 25 year olds. It’s nuts.
But it’s nuts in the most captivating of ways.
That’s something I’m always looking for in screenplays: authenticity. I look for events that I know are based in reality. Because I know, then, that what I’m watching is genuine. And when you feel like you’re watching something genuine, your very being gets pulled into the movie.
Remember suspension of disbelief? One of the worst things you can do as a screenwriter is have your characters or your plot do something that’s unrealistic. In doing so, you alert the reader that what they’re reading is bullshit. The suspension of disbelief is broken. The audience has tapped out.
With movies like this, it’s the opposite. The attention to detail is so on point that we feel even closer to the story than we normally would. I don’t know if there’s a term for the opposite of the breaking of suspension of disbelief. But if someone wants to invent it for this movie, feel free to do so.
So why isn’t the movie gaining more interest from the Academy? Why does it only have a 6.7 on IMDB? For the first hour and twenty minutes, I was ready to scream at all the dum-dums who had rated this film so poorly.
But then the third and final sequence of the movie came.
Oh.
Oh no.
Oh very much no.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a great movie fall apart so spectacularly.
Wow. Talk about a miscalculation.
We discuss this all the time on the site. A screenplay is a series of creative choices. And the ending is probably the most important creative choice of all. House of Dynamite quite possibly made the worst creative choice they could’ve made for the film’s ending.
But before we get to that, we have to acknowledge the other big issue with the third sequence which was that Idris Elba did a jarringly terrible job as the president of the United States. His big acting choice, as far as I could tell, was to be really tired for some reason. Even before the missile enters his day, he’s tired. And everyone he talks to, he’s tired.
If I’ve learned one thing from this movie, it’s that I do not want Idris Elba to be my president. This guy would drive any country into the ground. Because Oppenheim wrote him terribly too! Elba’s president is the most clueless person in the entire story. He seems to be learning everything on the fly. He can’t make any decisions. He asks every question sixteen times.
I get what Oppenheim was doing I think. He wanted the final sequence to be different – more personal. These other two sequences were all about pace. This was more about one person. Slowing it down and dealing with the problem from a single perspective. Which could’ve worked…
If Elba hadn’t shit the bed in the role. He was so awful. Which meant that, essentially, the entire final act didn’t work. And that was BEFORE we got to the unacceptable, ambiguous ending.
Ugh.
For movie lovers, there is nothing worse than a great movie that implodes right in front of your face. And just like this nuclear missile, you’re helpless to stop it.
I read some interviews with Bigelow and Oppenheim and they said that they chose to go with this ending believing it would “start a conversation.” Oh, it started a conversation all right. A conversation about how bad you destroyed your movie.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the stream (as long as you know going in that the ending is the worst ending ever – in fact, just stop after the first two sequences and imagine whatever you want to imagine for the final act. I promise you it will be better than what they came up with)
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This movie should be taught in screenwriting schools across the country for the danger of ending your script ambiguously. I’m not saying it never works. BUT IT DOESN’T WORK WAY MORE THAN IT DOES. And this movie should scare the shit out of ambiguity-obsessed screenwriters. Cause the choice of ending here – for us to never find out what the president decided or what happened to Chicago, in a movie that mined two hours of tension and anticipation from those very facilitators, was… I hate to say it… but an all-time moronic creative choice. You literally turned an Oscar-worthy movie into trash.
