A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE*****

Director Kathryn Bigelow (THE HURT LOCKER) and writer Noah Oppenheim (JACKIE) have created a stunningly good film that keeps your pulse racing and your mind spinning in the most disturbingly brilliant film of 2025. It will be on Netflix on October 24th but I urge you to watch it in a cinema if you can, to take advantage of the stunning score and sound design, and brilliant lensing.

The film is Apocalypse Rashomon. Someone has fired a nuclear weapon at the USA. The military and political command scramble to figure out who did it, but it's unclear whether it's Russia, North Korea, China, a cyberattack or an IT malfunction. Even switching from Defcon 4 to 2 alerts the USA's enemies to the fact that they are on a war footing. The single point of decision making is the President. Within 18 minutes of the missile being fired - not even hitting its target - just fired - he has to decide whether to retaliate or wait. Should he knock out the command and control centres of the USA's enemies, with mass casualties, to prevent yet more US cities being lost? Or should he trust Russia when they say it's not them? Take a chance that it was just a rogue actor or an IT failure? And risk losing an all-out nuclear war in minutes? What would you decide?

We see this decision tree played out over three acts and from three perspectives. The first segment is in the White House situation room, helmed by Rebecca Ferguson's highly trained naval officer. The reactions are varied. Some flee, panicked. Others buckle down and do their jobs, knowing their families are at risk and that they cannot warn them. We see the news trickle out into the White House and panic spread. There's a moment when Ferguson's character thinks her colleague and friend has left her. We think he might have too. He was planning to propose to his girlfriend that evening. When he returns we feel her relief: if this is the end of the world she won't be alone. There's another scene where she turns her face from that colleague to momentarily experience, and then have to peg back, her grief. This is beautifully acted by Ferguson and captured by DP Barry Ackroyd. Kathryn Bigelow's admiration for the professionalism and duty that these men and women exude is palpable and affecting.

In the second segment we run the 18 minutes from the perspective of those in Stratcom - a US military compound in the middle of nowhere, deep underground. These generals have rehearsed this situation hundreds of times and are prepared to take tough decisions. Except the decision is not theirs to take. They are merely in an advisory role. The always superb Tracy Letts anchors this segment as a four star general advising the president to go for an all out retaliation. On the other side of the argument, and the conference call, is a ludicrously young national security advisor played by Gabriel Basso (HILLBILLY ELEGY). He believes that POTUS should hold back and try and calm the other nuclear nations. 

The final segment is when we actually meet the President, as played by Idris Elba, who has so far just been a black tile and a panicking voice in a conference call. He is the one who has to take in all the information, and in the final scene, make his decision accompanied only by a mid-ranking Naval officer who shadows him at all times, carrying the nuclear football. He presents the President with a book of laminated options and explains the severity of the outcomes. What an impossible decision! Meanwhile, the heart of the film is arguably the Secretary of Defense, as played by Jared Harris (Chernobyl), who learns that his estranged daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) is in the city under attack, and has to somehow be of service to his President when his world is falling apart. 

I cannot speak highly enough of the actors in this film who have to essay their characters and moral dilemmas in very limited screen time. The characters are all good people trying to do their best. Even the most hawkish of them - Tracy Letts' general - has a reasonable and rational response. But the situation is impossible. I spent much of the film petrified at what would happen with the current incumbents in the roles of SecDefense and Potus, but also reassured at the competence of those in positions around them. I think this is partly Bigelow's point. Admire the professionals. Vote knowing that in extremis these are the decision makers you are empowering. 

I feel strongly that she deserves to be Oscar-nominated for this film, as does her screenwriter. There is real skill in creating a film of such verisimilitude and unrelenting tension, as well as one that provokes so many vital and urgent questions. The way that Oppenheim doubles back on the same scene from different angles, and deepens our understanding over the three segments, is masterful. Gabriel Basso's character is a case in point. He starts off as a bit of a joke. A tile on a zoom call jogging to work and losing signal. By the end he has gravitas and our empathy.

I would also nominate Rebecca Ferguson and Jared Harris in the Supporting Actor categories for performances of deep emotional power created in a handful of minutes of screen time. This is Harris' film more than anyone else's. Kudos also to Greta Lee and Tracy Letts.

A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE has a running time of 112 minutes and is rated R. It played Venice and will be released on Netflix on October 24th.

ZERO DARK THIRTY

It's taken me a while to get the necessary distance to review Kathryn Bigelow's controversial but critically acclaimed CIA procedural thriller, ZERO DARK THIRTY. The movie is meant to be an account of how US intelligence tracked down Osama Bin Laden, ending with a recreation on the fatal raid on his house in Abbotabad.  But it goes further than just being a fiction inspired by facts, as Tony Kushner would claim for the scrupulously researched LINCOLN.  Rather, Bigelow's movie opens with a statement of aggressive alignment with the truth, before playing real telephone calls from the Twin Towers.  So, before we even see an actor on screen, Bigelow has asked us to take her movie as THE definitive truth, and emotionally manipulated us by playing harrowing real audio from Bin Laden's most devastating terrorist attack.

We then move into the first two hours of the film, which is basically a standard police procedural, except that it features copious quantities of torture, which are shown to provide the information that leads directly to Bin Laden. Jessica Chastain is perfectly cast as Maya. She looks vulnerable and slight and this nicely contradicts her determination to the follow a slight lead despite her superiors' scepticism, even to the point of participating in graphically and unrelentingly depicted torture.  Of course, one can see Bigelow's not too thinly veiled metaphor for a female director's struggle in Hollywood, and every scene of genuine peril or tension is offset by the scenes of clichéd struggle against The Man. Did the real Maya theatrically and childishly use a marker to chalk up how many days the CIA knew about Abbotabad and refused to act?  Would a character as senior as Mark Strong's director really unleash a standard macho shouty tirade at his team?  It all felt rather written by rote. This was most evident in the sequence where a colleague of Maya's arranges a meeting with a potential lead - a meeting that is built up to be tense but where I was always aware of its dramatic purpose and obvious consequences.

The part of the movie that worked best for me was the final half hour, where Bigelow meticulously depicts the raid on Abbotabad, showing great technical accomplishment in her use of night vision equipment in conjunction with standard camera lenses, working in zero natural light.  I also respected the discretion with which she hinted at, but did not show the death and body of Bin Laden. And perhaps the  most finely judged dramatic moment of the film is the final shot, where Maya, mission accomplished, is left with the horrible existential, deeply political question "where do you want to go?"

The problem is that ZERO DARK THIRTY only deals in such political and moral sophistication in its final scene.  Up to that point, we are in no doubt that it is torture that produces the information that leads to Bin Laden.  For Bigelow, and her screenwriter Mark Boal, to suggest that they are just neutrally depicted "what happened" is disingenuous.  This is problematic.  Not only because it severely streamlines and simplifies a very complex issue, but because movies do not exist in a social and political vacuum as pure works of art with no consequences.  I am unsurprised to see the CIA measured but clearly angry denial that this is an accurate portrait of the hunt for Bin Laden, and to say that the content of this film will be inflammatory in certain quarters is an understatement. 

ZERO DARK THIRTY is on release in the USA, Spain, Canada, the Philippines, Taiwan, Portugal, Macedonia, France, Juwait, the Netherlands, Singapore, Finland, Ireland and the UK. It opens on January 31st in Belgium, Argentina, Australia, Germany, Israel, New Zealand, Lithuania, Sweden and Turkey. It opens on February 8th in Denmark, Italy, Estonia, Iceland, Norway and Poland. It opens on February 15th in Brazil and Japan; and on February 22nd in Chile, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Russia and Bulgaria.

ZERO DARK THIRTY is rated R in the USA and has a running time of 157 minutes.

THE HURT LOCKER - The horror

Hollywood loves a good war - the heroism, the pagentry, the tragedy, the acres of gleaming hardware, the loud explosions. This is the stuff of box office dreams. Never mind that many in Hollywood would consider themselves part of the liberal elite. The merchandise is often thinly veiled PR for the Armed Forces who lend out the armoured cars and planes to any movie with the right credentials. It has always struck me as ironic that an institution so intent on discriminating against homosexuals should have helped spawn movies that are so ra-ra pro-war that they trip into self-parody and camp. From TOP GUN to PEARL HARBOR, we all know that the girls are secondary to the guys and guns.

Of course, in Hollywood's soul, she is the last bastion of the liberal elite. There is, apparently, no contradiction in Clooney, Damon, diCaprio et al jetting round the world, belching out burnt jet fuel, to promote films persuading us to save the planet. And alongside the war-epics in which the US wins World War Two single-handedly (Enigma, anyone? Stalingrad?) there is another type of war film, typically made by independent film-makers or documentary-makers. These films look at micro-impact of war on the individual human being. The savagery of large-scale destruction is made understandable by seeing the degradation of an individual. Prime examples are CATCH-22, THE THIN RED LINE or, in a movie that brilliantly combined both big explosions AND a soul, APOCALYPSE NOW.

The Second Gulf War has been about as confused for Hollywood as it's been for the policymakers. No-one knows why we're at war in Iraq when the Taliban was sponsored by the Afghani government. No-one knows whether anyone actually ever thought there were Weapons of Mass Destruction. We know we won, four years ago, but it doesn't feel like victory. It's a war without clear-cut dates, campaigns and larger-than-life generals. It's not an epic invasion but a dog-fight from street to street, where insurgents blow up soldiers with Improvised Explosive Devices and our Heroic Boys in the Field are actually paid mercenaries accountable to no-one we vote for.

Clearly, the epic approach wasn't going to cut it. But what of Indie soul-searching? We've had some decent small films come out, each with a different take: GRACE IS GONE (grief); WAR INC (satire); IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH (police procedural); REDACTED (fictional recreation). None of them have taken any money although garnering decent enough reviews. And now comes the feted THE HURT LOCKER, and the buzz has begun: is this a war film that WILL FINALLY TAKE SOME MONEY? Of course, no-one can actually say that (or maybe they can in Variety).

Before watching the film I thought it's chances of pulling off both good reviews and receipts were high. The writer is Mark Boal, and you don't get more credible than having been an embedded journalist in Iraq. The director, however, is no bleeding heart liberal but a woman who knows how to direct tense thrillers, Kathryn Bigelow of K-19 WIDOWMAKER fame. Could this be the perfect balance between action and intellect? I also liked the idea of telling the story of Iraq by focusing on a bomb-denotation squad, and showing the politics only incidentally, through the impact of the campaign on the three common soldiers at the heart of the film. The film didn't disappoint. It's tense, compelling and a rare case where flashy camerawork (four hand-held cameras working simulatenously) helped rather than distracted from the subject-matter. In watching Bigelow's movie you get an idea of the futility of the campaign, the danger the soldiers have to live with, and the inhospitable terrain. Not only is it technically well-made and genuinely tense - the movie is also very well acted by three relatively unknown character actors: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty. It's worth watching, without a doubt. That's not to say it's one of the greatest war films, or even the best on the Second Gulf War. To my mind, nothing to date beats the visceral intensity and Gonzo brilliance of REDACTED. I also athought the marquee name cameos were distracting and that some of the dialogue was hackneyed. Still, overall, Bigelow and Boal have created a war film that shows, rather than tells, of the horror of war and the impossibility of going back. Kudos.

THE HURT LOCKER played Venice (where it was beaten in competition by THE WRESTLER) and Toronto 2008 and was released in Italy last year. It opened earlier this year in the USA, Indonesia and Iceland. It opens this weekend in Germany and Austria and on August 28th in the UK. It opens on September 17th in Portugal, on September 23rd in France and Norway; and on October 23rd in Estonia. It opens on January 8th 2010 in Taiwan.