Panic reigns in A House of Dynamite, the new Netflix thriller from The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow. Or it ought to, at least. The film is set in the minutes before a nuclear missile of uncertain origin strikes the mainland US. It’s a terrifying proposition, and through the splintered perspectives of the characters – security officials, military experts, and even the US president himself – we see just how quickly a nation can be rattled to its core. In the face of this calamity, though, we are shown a world of pervasive competence, of intellectual seriousness: the complex infrastructure developed to deal with a crisis exactly like this. For all the good it does them, the adults, as they say, are in charge.
Yet there’s a glaring hole at the centre of A House of Dynamite. Bigelow’s movie is ostensibly fixated on a sort of logistical hyperrealism – a granular play-by-play of a somewhat plausible (depending on who you ask) nuclear scenario. And yet it all ends up being a completely absurd fiction. Told in triptych, the film re-examines the same chunk of time – the half-hour or so when the missile is in flight – from multiple perspectives, the last focusing principally on that of the president, played by Idris Elba. Referred to only by his job title, Elba’s character is hardly a movie Potus for the ages: he’s conflicted and overwhelmed by the situation, a fallible but mostly rational leader. And he’s noteworthy because of just how little he resembles his real-world counterpart. Because the US doesn’t have Idris Elba as president. They have Donald Trump.
