By John Gilstrap

Okay, folks, SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD FOR “A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE”

Kathryn Bigelow’s celebrated new thriller, “House of Dynamite” is, in this writer’s humble opinion, something of a master class in how not to write a thriller. To be sure, the premise is gripping: A nuclear missile is detected en route to an as-yet unknown target in the United States, launched by an unknown enemy. This happens at a time when the U.S. is at Defcon 4 (peacetime) and during shift change in the White House Situation Room. Time to impact:18 minutes.

The first minute or so is wasted on what resonated as truth to me: “Wait, that can’t be right, can it? Is it a computer glitch?” Then, Captain Olivia Walker, the duty officer in the Situation Room calms everybody down. There are procedures to be followed, people to be notified, and actions to take. America fires two interceptor missiles (only two) to take out the incoming warheads, but they both miss, and the National Command Authority (NCA) accepts the inevitability of a nuclear strike in Chicago. (I’m not going to address the ridiculous plot holes, except for the one where Captain Walker, who lives in Virginia and clearly loves her husband, surreptitiously call him and tells him to get in the car and drive west–toward the incoming nuclear blast.)

The intense 18 minute period from launch to impact is presented more or less in real time, but just before impact, the film shifts to show the same events from the points of view of the various people we know that Captain Walker has been interacting with–saving the president, of course, for last. Call it 20 minutes of screen time. Out of a 90-minute movie.

The rest of the film shows the same actions, same results, from different points of view.

Twenty minutes in, I was breathless. I thought, Wow, what an exciting yet flawed, implausible movie! Then came the reality that they were going to quadruple-down on the same flaws and implausibilities, just from a different angle. WTF?

But I don’t want to talk plot. I want to talk structure and character, and that’s where this film truly fails.

The filmmaker was making a point rather than a piece of entertainment.

Eighteen minutes ain’t a lot of time to make 100% correct decisions under stress. Got it. (And from submarine based platforms off the East Coast, the flight times are more like eight minutes.) Presidents, played in this case by Idris Elba, whose talents are woefully squandered, don’t spend a lot of their spare time scouring the target packages contained in the infamous “football”, which itself is cared for in the film by a twenty-something junior officer. Got it again. Awesome decisions must be made on the fly. Finally, horror of horrors, government officials give their families a heads up to get out of town before the roads become impassible. (Between you and me, I would 100% do that. RHIP, baby.)

The flaw in the film is that everybody simply follows the book–literally and figuratively. No one dares to fire an unauthorized third interceptor missile in attempt to save millions of lives even if it scorches their career. (Okay, I can’t resist a plot comment here. They limit the interceptor package to two missiles because they might need more if there’s a second attack. Better to char the Windy City. That made sense to a Hollywood writer. Someone needs a good old-fashioned Three Stooges slap, hair-pull and eye-poke.)

Reading procedures, discussing the efficacy of procedures, and then ultimately following them is . . . what’s the word? Oh, yeah. Boring.

A thriller is about characters taking chances and succeeding or failing as a result.

I don’t care about anyone in this film.

This reflects back on the intellectual origins of the film. Every character is merely a game piece to be manipulated to bring the larger points home. Once NCA wrote off the millions of innocents in the greater Chicagoland area, why would I give a rat’s patootie whether or not SecDef gets a last chance to tell his daughter he loves her? We all love our kids, buddy, and you just shrugged at toasting millions of them.

Stakes and tension are different things.

Within the first ten minutes of this turkey, we know the the Miracle Mile will soon be baked to glass because the screenwriter says it must be so. In storytelling parlance, I believe that’s called a Big Reveal. Normally, those are saved for the third reel, not the first. All that remains is the question of how the president should respond. The military cliche, of course, pushes for a global, kill-everybody response, and President Elba seems confused and disturbed by the plastic-sheeted four-color Denny’s-like menu sheets that details the pre-targets smorgasbord of retaliatory options. (Had I been sought out for my technical guidance, I might have asked, what’s the hurry to retaliate? As absurdly unlikely it is that an ICBM could be launched from an untraceable location, once detonated, the forensic evidence left behind would tell us everything we need to know for a surgical strike.)

The ending sucks.

That’s it on the ending. Hard stop. Sucks.

Never forget what a thriller is all about.

Pacing, tension, and ever increasing stakes for the characters are the elements that separate a thriller from the other suspense genres. That’s the job of the writer. If it’s a film, add screenwriter and director to that list.

If you ever allow an agenda to take the front seat, your project is doomed.