DUBAI: It looked so good on paper. A nuclear war-themed thriller with a script from award-winning screenwriter Noah Oppenheim, directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow, and starring a handful of excellent actors including Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, Jared Harris and Gabriel Basso.
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And for the first 20 minutes or so, “A House of Dynamite” delivers. We meet Captain Olivia Walker (Ferguson), the oversight officer for the White House Situation Room, on her way to work, where she’s informed of several significant geopolitical developments involving — separately — China, Iran, and North Korea. Then the US early-warning radar system detects an unidentified intercontinental ballistic missile (i.e. a missile with the capability to carry a nuclear warhead a very long way) already in flight (it missed the launch point, so no one knows who’s responsible for firing it) over the Pacific. At first, it’s assumed to be a routine test by North Korea, so no one really panics. But when the ICBM enters low orbit, and they figure out its likeliest destination will be Chicago, everyone really panics. With less than 20 minutes until impact, there are some horrifying decisions to be made, particularly when the two ground-based interceptors launched to intercept the ICBM fail to do so.
