Kathryn Bigelow’s film — a return to form — landed to much better reviews than expected. We won’t have to wait long to see it (I am no longer invited to see Netflix movies early so I’ll have to buy a ticket the old fashioned way).
For a film to make it into the Oscar race, it needs hundreds of number one votes. If it isn’t right at the top, it must be near the top, at 2 or 3. What drives a movie there is usually passion for the filmmaker or passion for the film or whether or not the film feels ‘important’ and ‘necessary.’
In this case, what might drive Bigelow’s film and does it obliterate Netflix’s other offerings, like Jay Kelly? I think, personally, it might have a better shot than Jay Kelly simply because it’s directed by a woman and not only a woman, but the first woman to win Picture and Director for The Hurt Locker in 2009 — coming into the Oscar year, hilariously, with another Jim Cameron movie — Avatar. Bigelow back in her wheelhouse with a war movie and Cameron back in his wheelhouse with Avatar.
Either way, this is one of the few films on offer I am excited about seeing this Oscar season. It’s possible it turns out to be Netflix’s strongest contender, as Scott Kernen mentioned on our last podcast.
Here’s the plot: When a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States, a race begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond.
The film stars Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee, and Jason Clarke.
In select theaters October 3 in the UK, globally October 10 and on Netflix October 24.
Netflix has dropped a teaser:
Glenn Kenny gives the film four stars, writing:
Earlier this year, Idris Elba played the British Prime Minister in “Heads of State,” a broad and raucous farce produced by Amazon. This week at the Venice Film Festival, he plays an American President in “A House of Dynamite,” a tense, precise, extremely sobering thriller produced by Netflix. This testifies to his range on a number of levels.
“Dynamite” is the long-awaited new film directed by Kathryn Bigelow, whose last picture was almost a decade ago. That was “Detroit,” which was a fact-based drama; her three prior films, including the highly praised and awarded “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” were historical dramas as well. “Dynamite,” scripted by Noel Oppenheim, is a fiction. It’s also a warning. The tagline for the movie on the posters out here is “Not if. When.”
Alex Billington praises the film as a sequel to Oppenheimer, more or less:
Whoa. Kathryn Bigelow just made a surprise sequel to Oppenheimer. This is one of the most intensely thrilling movies of the year. Goodness gracious. My palms are still sweaty writing about it now hours after the screening. A House of Dynamite, which should’ve kept the original title as stated in the dialogue, A House Filled with Dynamite, is the first feature film made by Kathryn Bigelow since making Detroitin 2017. She’s back with a fury, with a vengeance, with a story that is going to stir things up and get people talking. But of course – that’s the point. The whole movie is designed to get people to start discussing, well, everything about the state of the world right now. It’s not really a sequel to Oppenheimer but it actually kind of fits because it’s the most vivid continuation of the second half of that masterpiece movie. Nuclear fears are back and more powerful than ever in the real world. And this movie wonders: what would we do in only 20 minutes if there was a single nuclear missile fired towards a major American city? How would the US respond? What would happen? Would the President “push the button” and retaliate with more nukes? It doesn’t actually give any answers but it does get us thinking about the actual answers to all these questions.
Peter Bradshaw drops the rare five stars:
Bigelow, with screenwriter Noah Oppenheim, broaches one of the most frightening thoughts of all: that a nuclear war could or rather will start with no one knowing who started it or who ended it. I watched this film with translucently white knuckles but also that strange climbing nausea that only this topic can create.
The drama is recounted in one 18-minute segment, repeated from various standpoints and various locations: 18 minutes being the time estimated to elapse between military observers reporting the out-of-the-blue launch of a nuke from the Pacific and its projected arrival in Chicago.
The action plays out in a series of situation rooms and command-and-control suites with acronyms like PEOC (Presidential Emergency Operations Center) featuring military and civilian personnel in banks of desks, generally in a shallow horseshoe shape facing a very big screen flashing up the threat level from Defcon 2 to Defcon 1 and also showing a large map displaying the missile’s current position, which is occasionally replaced with what amounts to a Zoom mosaic of tense faces belonging to high-ranking officials with no idea what to do, dialling in chaotically from their smartphones.
In the dissenting view, is Owen Gleiberman at EW:
To be honest, I was surprised to see Kathryn Bigelow rely on so many of these breathless generic devices. At her best she’s a great filmmaker, one who brought the secret assassination of Osama bin Laden to a riveting pitch of authentic life in “Zero Dark Thirty,” and who in her follow-up film, “Detroit” (2017), dramatized the Algiers Motel incident that took place during Detroit’s 1967 12th Street Riot, imagining her way inside it with a complex force that got behind the face of American police brutality. But “Detroit,” vital a film as I thought it was, did not get a good response, and it went down as a major dud. Bigelow hasn’t directed another film until now, and “A House of Dynamite” is just the kind of movie you make when you’re trying to bounce back from a failure of that magnitude. It’s easy to watch, it’s wired to be exciting, with a showy hot-button relevance, but the problem with the movie is that it isn’t quite convincing. It’s trapped between trying to be a “serious” thriller and a piece of glorified schlock.
