By Peter Keough

Maybe A House of Dynamite wants to tantalize us with a nightmare from which there is no escape in order to distract us, briefly, from the ongoing disasters that we are compelled to face and overcome.

A House of Dynamite. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Screenplay by Noah Oppenheim. At the Kendall Square, Coolidge Corner, West Newton, and suburbs. Streaming on Netflix beginning October 24.

Maj. Gonzales (Anthony Ramos), who leads the missile defense base in Fort Greely, Alaska in A House of Dynamite. Photo: Eros Hoagland/Netflix

Something you don’t want to see is an officer stumbling out of a bunker in an anti missile base in Alaska, falling to his knees, and vomiting. That’s one of many gut-wrenching moments in Kathryn Bigelow’s tense, expertly detailed, but politically problematic thriller.

An ICBM apparently armed with a nuclear warhead has been launched somewhere off the coast of Asia and is heading our way, its likely target Chicago and the ten million blissfully unaware inhabitants of the region. The missile launched to knock it down has had “negative impact.” When the low probability of a successful interception is explained, the Secretary of Defense (or War, as it is now called) Reid Baker (Jared Harris) exclaims, “So it’s a fucking coin toss? That’s what 50 billion dollars buys us?”

His daughter, it turns out, lives in Chicago.

We have been here before, from  Cold War classics like Sidney Lumet’s stark, no frills Fail Safe (1964) to Peter Watkin’s hair-raising, low budget pseudo-documentary The War Game (1966), to rare post-Soviet-era efforts like the made-for-TV movie By Dawn’s Early Light (1990), which boasts a premise remarkably similar to Bigelow’s.

Most of those films dramatize, or at least specify, the causes or aftermath or both. But in Dynamite agency and consequences are not of prime concern. Rather, it ponders the gray area between — the chaos of uncertainty, doubt, indecision, pathos, horror, and despair after the mystery launch and before its final outcome.

To do so it indulges in a repeat structure that some have found annoying but that cold-bloodedly notches up the tension and terror. Though rare, such a structure is not new, an obvious example being Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950). More recent examples include Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Blind Chance (1981), Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998), among others. But Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim’s version differs in that the cyclic narrative  does not offer much in the way of revelation, resolution, or even a switch in point of view. Instead, each iteration moves inward from the fringes, such as the far-flung military bases dealing with threats, to the inner circles of the President’s cabinet and advisors, and finally to the President himself, the ultimate source of power, or perhaps impotence and futility.

That role is played with due gravitas and sufficient human frailty by Idris Elba, who enters the pantheon of Black presidents presiding over cataclysms that includes Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact (1998), Danny Glover in 2012 (2009), and Tommy Lister Jr. as Galactic President of the Federated Territories in The Fifth Element (1997). Elba evinces some of the easy authority of Obama and a bit of the aw shucks regular guyness of G.W. Bush, the latter especially when the Secret Service gives him the bum’s rush from a youth charity event with the WNBA into a limo where he is informed that the country is under attack.

Up to then, the POTUS has only been a voice on a cell phone. Now we get to see him in the flesh, as he is confronted by aides and advisors presenting him with increasingly desperate decisions to make. Like hard nosed General Brady (Tracy Betts), who almost echoes the advice of General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove (1964) when he tells the President that losing ten million people is regrettable, but he might want to consider how best to take advantage of the situation. “This is insanity,” objects the President. “No sir,” says General Brady, “this is reality.”

Or both, as the case may be. Like me, you might find yourself wondering how this might play out with our current, real-life cast of characters. Like, President Trump calling Melania for advice on which of the retaliation scenarios from the menu-from-hell “Nuclear Decision Handbook” he should choose. Scary thought, but the filmmakers seem to be suggesting that no matter who is in that position, it would make no difference at all.

Is this a cop-out, as with Civil War or One Battle After Another, films that touch on hot button issues only to exploit them and not offer any analysis, context, or insight? If so, one can hardly blame Bigelow, given her past experiences of stepping into such heated fray. In 2017, her last film, the box-office loser and critically challenged Detroit, unflinchingly confronted the atrocities committed during the 1967 riot in the title city. It jettisoned her career into an eight-year limbo. In 1995 Strange Days (1995) was a box-office flop that also probed the causes and consequences of racist violence. It left her without another project for five years.

With Detroit in particular, in which she showed what happens when federal and local powers are unleashed on an urban population, it was not the grotesque realities depicted that scared off audiences and critics so much as the obligation to act that the film demands. In that sense, Detroit is much more relevant to our current situation than Dynamite, which poses a problem, generates fear, but offers no solution. It fact, it seems to suggest there is no solution. Maybe A House of Dynamite wants to tantalize us with a nightmare from which there is no escape in order to distract us, briefly, from the ongoing disasters that we are compelled to face and overcome.

So is it escapist entertainment? The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation hope not and offer a “Pre-Watch Guide to ‘A House of Dynamite’” (available here) for those interested in what can be done.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, including Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2013) and  For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).