A House of Dynamite is an attempt to bring the Cold War-era nuclear crisis procedural film into our new Cool War era. That genre consists of the canonical Dr. Strangelove film and now play; FAIL-SAFE and its live made-for TV remake; the TV miniseries World War III; and the important but buried under immediate post-Cold War debris, By Dawn’s Early Light. Any approach to A House of Dynamite should take into consideration two things: how does it hold up as a film, and how does it hold up when compared to procedural and strategic reality?
A House of Dynamite is essentially a play in three acts, with concurrent activity between the character in the acts. The basic scenario in the film is the launch of an unattributable ICBM that is detected late by the U.S. missile warning and interception system, the interception fails, and the characters have 18 minutes to react to the situation before it hits Chicago. The film is nearly two hours long, so the overlapping narrative, which is arguably overloaded with what we could call “human meddling” errrr…..”human interest,” tends to detract from the tension of the situation. In Dr. Strangelove and FAIL-SAFE, the drama can play out over hours and come to a crescendo at the end because the scenario is bomber-based and it takes time for them to get there, thus allowing a build-up of tension as the principles figure out a response. World War III similarly is about an escalatory situation that comes out of a covert action gone wrong, and takes time to build up to an ending which is almost as inconclusive as A House of Dynamite’s. By Dawn’s Early Light’s drama is driven by a series of pulses: the first is, like A House of Dynamite, an unattributed single missile attack against Russia and the immediate ICBM response, followed by the trials and travails of a B-52 crew in the middle of all of this, followed by the search for a Presidential successor, followed by a bifurcated command structure, one trying to stop the war, the other trying to accelerate it. This pulse-like structure maintains audience tension. A House of Dynamite narrative structure gives us something different.