Producers: Greg Shapiro, Kathryn Bigelow and Noah Oppenheim   Director: Kathryn Bigelow   Screenplay: Noah Oppenheim   Cast: Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee, Jason Clarke, Malachi Beasley, Brian Tee, Brittany O’Grady, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Willa Fitzgerald, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Kyle Allen, Kaitlyn Dever, Francesca Carpanini, Abubakr Ali, Neal Bledsoe, Nicholas Monterosso, Jared Reinfeldt and Angel Reese   Distributor: Netflix

Grade: C

A great film has been made about the dangers of nuclear weapons.  Unfortunately, it’s not this one by Kathryn Bigelow, but Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece “Dr. Strangelove,” which used absurdist humor to encapsulate the insanity of the Cold War arms race.  Bigelow’s modern-day take, based on the proliferation of nuclear weapons that’s occurred in the intervening sixty-plus years, is by contrast an earnest, sober cautionary tale, more akin to Sidney Lumet’s “Fail-Safe,” which appeared roughly at the same time as Kubrick’s acerbic satire and left much less of a lasting impression.  You might think of it as a companion piece to Nicholas Meyer’s 1983 telefilm “The Day After,” except with a title change to “The Day Before.”

The setup of the script by Noah Oppenheim (who contributed to episodes in the “Maze Runner” and “Divergent” franchises and wrote Pablo Larrain’s “Jackie”) is simple: a single ballistic missile has been launched from somewhere in the Pacific against the continental U.S.—the trajectory is eventually determined to wind up in Chicago—and the unnamed President (Idris Elba) must decide how to respond. 

But instead of constructing the story in a straightforwardly chronological fashion, Oppenheim has divided it into three acts, the last two of which repeat the action of the first but from differing perspectives.  Meanwhile Bigelow, cinematographer Barry Ackroyd and editor Kirk Baxter are working overtime to energize things with hectic movement and frantic cutting, always abetted by Volker Bertelmann’s doom-laden score.  But the repetitious recounting of the countdown to the missile’s impact ironically undermines the impact of the film as a whole.

The initial chapter moves back and forth between two locales.  One is a military base in Alaska, where Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) oversees a crew seated at monitors that show satellite observations of the skies.  Suddenly an object appears—a missile, its precise launch point unknown, streaking toward the United States, which it’s primed in reach in less than twenty minutes. The focus shifts to the situation room in the White House, where Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) serves as second in command to Admiral Mark Miller (Jason Clarke).  Shocked by the reports, they’re soon video-conferencing with senior officials to determine how to respond to the emergency, which grows exponentially more dangerous when interceptor missiles launched from Alaska fail to down their target.  There are periodic shifts to Cathy Rogers (Moses Ingram), a FEMA supervisor who’s ordered to take refuge in a bunker outside Washington, and Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso), the young Deputy National Security Advisor called on to make swift recommendations when his boss is unreachable.

Then we move to the second chapter as General Anthony Brody (Tracy Letts), the senior officer of the U.S. Strategic Command, arrives at his post, ordering extra sugar in his coffee while grumbling about a baseball game he’d watched the night before.  His attitude changes when he’s placed onto the conference call, and his bellicose inclinations about how to respond are contrasted with Jake’s more measured recommendations as contact with foreign governments suggest that Moscow and Beijing deny responsibility but claim they’ll have to prepare their forces if U.S. retaliatory measures escalate.  Contact with Ana Park (Greta Lee), the NSA’s North Korea expert who’s spending the day with her son at a reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg, can offer little but generalizations.

The final chapter finally introduces Elba as the President, hitherto only heard on the video call, as he’s quickly removed by the Secret Service head (Brian Tee) from a photo op with a girls’ basketball team for a helicopter ride to the bunker with his military aide (Jonah Hauer-King), who advises him on retaliatory options while he confers with his overwrought Secretary of Defense Reid Baker (Jared Harris) as the countdown to detonation in Chicago inexorably proceeds though, unlike in “Strangelove,” we don’t see the actual explosion—leaving open myriad possibilities (does the warhead fail? Does the missile even carry one?).

Kubrick masterfully built up tension throughout his film even while shifting from character to character and place to place, and garnering huge laughs in the process.  Bigelow, who proved so skillful with suspense in “The Hurt Locker” and “Detroit” (and sheer terror if you go back to “Near Dark”), is hobbled by Oppenheim’s three-chapter approach, which effectively brings us to the same cliff three times before ultimately refusing to jump off.  It’s a strategy that proves as much a failure as those interceptors, whose missed opportunity causes Reid to bellow about having wasted fifty billion dollars on a coin-toss and Admiral Miller sadly admits, “There is no Plan B.”

The movie’s further weakened by the effort to humanize the sketchy characters with domestic references.  At the very start, Gonzalez is in a funk over a phone call with his wife, and later the President gets into contact with his (Renée Elise Goldsberry), who’s off in Kenya.  Olivia’s lieutenant Davis (Malachi Beasley) was about to propose to his girlfriend, and Walker herself takes time to phone her husband (Neal Bledsoe) and tell him to put their son (Nicholas Monterosso) in their car and just “drive west”—a curious directive if they’re in Washington and the missile is headed for Illinois.  Baerington too is concerned for his wife (Brittany O’Grady), a congressional aide.

But certainly the worst example of this soapoperatic padding involves Reid, who seems emotionally unsuited to his job to begin with, but goes virtually apoplectic when he learns that the rogue missile is headed for Chicago, where his estranged daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) is living.  He calls her to reconnect, only to find that she has a new live-in boyfriend (Jared Reinfeldt), and though that seems to offer him some small comfort, the weight of his inability to respond to the missile threat leads him to literally take the jump that Bigelow and Oppenheim are unwilling to.

To give the film its due, it’s competently made technically.  In addition to Ackroyd and Baxter, one can point to perfectly adequate work from production designer Jeremy Hindle, costumer Sarah Edwards, the visual effects team led by Chris Harvey and sound designer Paul N.J. Ottoson, whose efforts complement Bertelmann’s.  As to the cast, some—Harris especially, and to a lesser extent Elba and Letts—come across too broadly, but most play their thin characters without overdoing things. Everyone behind the film is clearly earnest about issuing a warning about the continuing danger posed by nuclear weapons. 

But while “A House of Dynamite,” which the last chapter uses as a title to suggest the precarious state of a world order that’s come to accept their proliferation as a fait accompli, raises alarms about what’s unquestionably a real issue, by the close its sense of urgency has dissipated in a welter of melodramatic contrivances and—if you’ll excuse the phrase—bombastic excess.