Movie Review: House of Dynamite

The new movie, House of Dynamite by Katherine Bigelow has the director’s signature of excellent staging, good acting and storytelling precision. The first act moves like a well tuned machine. Earlier Bigelow gave us the oscar winning Hurt Locker and the dramatic  Zero Dark Thirty, and she certainly knows how to shape pressure into story.

Like the German movie Run Lola Run and the more recent Tom Cruise sci-fi movie, Edge of Tomorro, this Bigelow movie tells its story three times, each from a different point of view. The first telling since it is introductory pulls us into the story.  A missile from an unknown source is in its way in.  May the audience’s heart race!

The second telling should add depth of perspective but curiously does not.  A real chance to add a backstory or even a plot twist is lost.  But as viewers, we are willing to forgo this lapse in the rush of the plot, “what happens next?!”

In the third go around, the director has the chance to give it all.  But she chooses to go the route of Frank Stockton's 1882 short story, “The lady or the tiger,” which at this point more than a century later, is a shopworn plot device. 

The director’s craft is beyond question, she still commands the frame. The performances are strong. But the story does not land.  While behavioral science tells us that in decision making, recency bias needs to be combatted, in story telling recency bias rules.  So if a story does not stick the landing, no one will say, “but the opening was great!”  Just ask (not) fans of Game of Thrones!

House of Dynamite had a chance, but stories, like missiles, must reach their target.