should have made it out of glass instead, the better
to throw rocks from
dir: Kathryn Bigelow
2025
Fuck this film, honestly.
Sure, it’s well made, the performances are all fine, the tension is over the top, but come on.
I don’t think anyone other than the dumbest of Americans thinks nuclear war is winnable, that there’s a scenario whereby one can win a war by using nuclear weapons (now). I think most people get that having them means countries without them can’t attack you or talk too much shit about you. With the countries that have them, well, you fight through proxies, but never directly, because you don’t want to nuke each other.
We all pretty much get that if one was launched at the States, or at China, or Russia, from anywhere, we’re pretty much all fucked. It’s all over. Done. This film goes to some trouble to explain why.
In the 80s at least, though it was policy probably decades before, the president at the time, who the rest of us naively thought would be the worst president those fuckheads would come up with after Nixon, explained to the American people that Reagan’s policy with respect to what would happen if the Soviets ever launched or detonated a missile over the US would mean there would be Mutually Assured Destruction. If the States couldn’t rule the world, there was no way they were going to let the Russkies have all the cake and eat it too. If we go, we all go, was the message.
And sure, after that, there was all that stuff about ‘Star Wars’ / the SDI project to potentially protect the States from other people’s nuclear missiles, where a senile septuagenarian imagined there was a magical / technological way to stop other people’s missiles but make sure the American ones got through.
It’s been 40 years since then. Billions of dollars later, the Americans, if this film is accurate, and there is no reason to really think it is, believe that if one missile is launched at them from anywhere, they maybe have 50 – 50 chance of blowing it up before it re-enters the atmosphere.
So, really, they’re not even pretending any more. Planning for these kinds of scenarios requires the people at the top believing that the leaders of other countries, regardless of their rhetoric or what propaganda they deliver to their own populations, are ultimately rational people. That the leaders of even those kinds of countries that routinely scream Death to America and threaten to destroy it, that even these people ultimately want to stay in power, want to live in a world where they can still live and breathe and keep oppressing their own people, that the great game may continue.
Something that happens outside of that can be imagined, but how can you plan for it?
I don’t think any part of this flick is meant to be reassuring. There’s no one, not even a flag-humping Trump voting dumb fuck who is reassured by watching bureaucratic processes work as planned. Bureaucrats (like me) might have some admiration for how those tasked to jump into action in order to guarantee continuity (of control by the government) of services, but anyone else watching this would think “that’s okay for them hoity-toity fucks at the top of government agencies, but the rest of us are totally fucked”.
And they’d be right. If this peripatetic flick has multiple themes, one of them, other than the government is fairly competent, with fairly competent people in important positions (clearly this was not written with Trump’s ghastly second term in mind), is that in the midst of a national / global crisis like this, people would do their best, but they’d also be desperately trying to save their own loved ones over anyone else.
Almost every character, at some point, breaks protocol or whatever other strictures might be upon them, in order to try to save their people.
This appallingly frustrating flick is mostly made up of three sections, Inclination is Flattening, Hitting a Bullet with a Bullet, and A House Filled with Dynamite, but they’re all about the same span of about 20 minutes or so, just from the perspectives of different people at different times. There is a tiny epilogue, and something that happens during the credits, but that’s it.
The reason the first section is as long as it is, is because it covers a few scenes before a launch is detected from somewhere in the northern Pacific, to the time when the missile is expected to hit the continental US. Sixteen minutes. The missile is travelling at around 6 kilometres a second, if it is a missile. I’m not sure if that even constitutes a spoiler, a crippling spoiler that would reveal too much and render the experience a non-issue or unpleasant for the viewer.
Fuck that. This flick is a headache and a panic attack rolled up with extra anxiety and discomfort as a chaser.
And then it ends, and restarts from someone else’s perspective.
That first section is the most important section of the film, and the only one that really succeeds, to a certain point. Don’t get me wrong, the other sections have wonderful acting and gut wrenching stuff (intellectually, not visually), but they don’t have the impact of the first section, because they can’t, they just can’t.
What transpires is kind of meant to be horrifying, whichever the section, being the point that, we are meant to assume that the world is already locked in to its own destruction because of the processes countries like the States and presumably the others too, will do automatically just because. In the 80s we thought belligerence, ideology, the stupidity of powerful men might doom us all, but now it seems like efficiency and process will do it instead.
However realistic, whatever the verisimilitude of the set up shots and the Washington setting and the seriousness on the faces of the actors involved in these various rooms, these important rooms, I can’t think that this is actually true. I mean, if it’s accurate, why would you horrify your population and clue in your enemies as to how easy it would be to get that world destroyed in about half an hour?
I have to tell myself it’s all the work of creative screenwriters. And if they’re trying to say nothing more fundamental than “nuclear war be bad, m’kay?” then their work is done, surely? With the current orange fuckhead in the White House, the what if? about a rogue missile seems less likely and concerning to me than “what if that horrible shit-stain of a human being decides one morning to just nuke anyone because they said something mean about him, or that he doesn’t give a fuck about a world he’s not in control of?”
With all the insanity that pours out of that cursed nation on a daily basis, you’re telling me that that is the unlikely scenario? That some rogue nation would have the tech and support to launch and detonate a missile undetected at point of launch hitting a major American city?
Why would they bother? The Americans seem like they’ll be eating themselves and each other shortly anyway.
I know that sounds like I’m not taking this scenario seriously, or this flick, and that’s probably right. Bingo! I am not sure it stacks up against the other flicks in this horrible genre. Fail Safe: where an American president has to contemplate detonating a missile on one of their own cities in order to make up for accidentally bombing a Russian city, and to prevent a full scale nuclear war; Dr Strangelove: that Mutually Assured Destruction assures that eventually, human stupidity will doom us all, and War Games, that if you took the question of launching a nuclear strike out of human hands, and entrusted it to a computer, the computer would kill us at the earliest opportunity.
Then of course there’s the sequel to War Games, being Terminator 2: Judgement Day, which emphasised that creating AI and putting it in charge of anything important means we’re all fucked.
Ship has sailed on that one. There’s no take away, no message to carry with us, no determination to work towards. We’re so used to the inevitability of it happening, given all the post-apocalyptic shows we watch, and we routinely see Americans acting like it’s already happened, such that maybe we’re inured to the threat. However stressful watching this film might be, that’s a function of the acting, the editing and the camerawork. It’s not the thing they’re trying to desperately stop.
Some of the actors here do some great work in the service of some appalling concepts. Idris Elba, in this one year, played the British Prime Minister in Heads of State, and the US President right here. Talk about range, talk about versatility. His face, when he’s having to contemplate launching a strike that will likely end most life on the planet, is something to behold.
Tracy Letts, acclaimed playwright and actor, plays a high up general, and he performs his role with aplomb, of the senior military strategic adviser explaining to the president why he just absolutely has to end most life on the planet, but from the perspective of someone who would rather flip the board than lose a game of Monopoly. Rebecca Ferguson plays a senior White House adviser and she dominates the first 20 minutes. Gabriel Basso as the senior available NSA advisor rules the second section, and does really well. I thought he was great until I remembered that he played JD Vance in that fucking biopic about his salt of the earth bullshit in Hillbilly Elegy, and then I couldn’t stop myself from making a growling sound in my throat, wanting him to fuck off.
Greta Lee is even in this! She should be in everything. She too plays an expert, they’re all experts, don’t you know, not just podcasters elevated to senior roles for their bootlicking skills, but if nothing else this flick proves that even expertise isn’t going to save us.
It’s so fucking frustrating. I can’t even tell you why, but I was actively angry when the flick ended. I know it was as intended, I know that maybe it’s the point, but goddamn, it doesn’t make me feel positive things towards the flick.
A House of Dynamite. Who knew nuclear war could be so irritating?
7 times and don’t even get me started on Jarred Harris’s walk off the roof out of 10
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“I've worked for three. They're all chronically late narcissists. At least this one reads the newspaper.” - A House of Dynamite
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