A House of Dynamite

A bunch of people with important jobs take their work very seriously, even though they are also regular human beings: in short, Bigelow sticks to her schtick, with all of those marks and signs of urgent “realism” that have become so familiar and predictable in her work, as well as in the work of Paul Greengrass and so many others. One can choose to see the film either as a timely reminder of the persistence of the nuclear threat in an increasingly unstable geopolitical milieu or as an ideological depiction of the American state system as our best and most developed safeguard, populated by occasionally flawed but still highly responsible individuals. Either way, the pertinence and pointedness of DR. STRANGELOVE (1964) remains unsurpassed (not to mention I LIVE IN FEAR, 1955). Still, one could indeed make a case that this has more to say about our contemporary situation than does OPPENHEIMER (2023), though the use of nonlinear storytelling à la THE KILLING (1956), while making it possible to see a broader perspective on synchronous processes of a single system, to some extent dissipates the feeling of tension that the filmmakers so obviously want to conjure. Some viewers may be distracted by the feeling that a disproportionate number of characters in positions of significant authority are either women or black people or both, and that the representation and attitudes of characters are somewhat determined by considerations of this kind in the minds of the filmmakers, but in reality this kind of thing has been operating in Hollywood for decades and is not really worth paying attention to at this point.