A House of Dynamite      3 stars

It has been eight years since Kathryn Bigelow’s last movie, Detroit, and now the movie everyone seems to be talking about, A House of Dynamite, has been showing on Netflix after a brief theatrical run. Academy Award winner Bigelow has impressed us before with her high-tension thrillers like The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty and Detroit so now she has turned her attention to showing us what the launching of a nuclear missile at the United States might look like. Unfortunately, the intention of depicting this kind of crisis doesn’t fit well into the format of a 90-to-120-minute movie. The idea is to show as realistically as possible how the US military would respond to an attack by a single nuclear missile fired at the middle of the country from an unknown adversary. Since the time it takes from detection to impact is only nineteen minutes, there is a lot of extra time to fill in. Bigelow’s answer to this problem is to first show the events in the White House situation room with some additional scenes from military bases, but then when the missile arrives, we back up several minutes and replay the events from different perspectives including those of high-ranking officials. Then we do it all over again, this time with POTUS (Idris Elba) being the focus of most of the scenes. So, after the first time through much of the tension is gone as we know what to expect. The big question is what will be the response of the US military. Will the president order an all-out retaliation, or will he accept the loss of a major city, hoping to deescalate the situation? Another problem with the film is that there are so many characters, many of which only appear briefly. We don’t get the chance to know their story or what makes them tick. There are plenty of big names in the movie including Rebecca Ferguson, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts and Jason Clarke that expertly play their parts, but I would like to know more about their characters. I understand that many military consultants were employed to get the details right. But sometimes realism doesn’t result in the most interesting movie.