Film The Guardian has a piece today about Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite in which Mike McCahill says various things about the film, but like a lot of critics he doesn't seem to have found the virtues I found in how the story is structured and particularly the climax, which I won't spoil for those of you who haven't had a chance to watch it amongst the firehouse of stuff released every day.
The number of film writers who've missed the point of A House of Dynamite are worryingly large. It's not a thriller, it's a character study. The repetition is the point. We're seeing the calamity through the lenses of much smaller and less knowledgeable groups as the decision on whether to retaliate ends up on the shoulders of someone who even less qualified than they are. At a basic level, don't give human beings world-ending weaponry. It's bad.
On each iteration we hear exposition and dialogue and then discover their significance as the narrative elements repeat. In the first couple of rounds, the President sounds Trumpian and incompetent. But when we finally meet him, he's an affable, smart person who is then handed the worst decision in the world at a moment's notice and has a series of near or total strangers advising him.
Which is utterly disturbing and in sharp relief to something like Fail Safe (both versions) and most of these kinds of films, in which almost all Presidents are portrayed as some kind of academic and diplomatic paragon in a fantasy world in which someone is elected based on how smart they are, which has *rarely* been the case. Unlike those films, the heads of state wouldn't immediately be on the phone with one another. The contact takes place way below the chain.
There's a terrific article in Slate by Fred Kaplan (ht, Allyn), a Pulitzer Prize nominated author of a book about just this subject which offers much greater depth on how realistic the film is and if anything it's even less terrifying than the situation we're in now when all of the key positions shown in the film are filled with people whose only qualification is they're willing to tell the President what he wants to hear all of the time.
But my overall point is that a lot of critics have missed that it isn't a traditional Clancyesque thriller. They've gone in expecting The Sum of All Fears or By Dawn's Early Light (which shares a similar story) and been disappointed. It's an "art house" film wearing the trappings of a mid-budget Summer blockbuster which asks the viewer to make a psychological leap beyond what they expect it to be into what it is.