Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson and Tracy Letts star in this immaculately constructed nightmare procedural that ticks down the minutes from an atomic bomb’s launch to its detonation
Kathryn Bigelow has reopened the subject that we all tacitly agree not to discuss or imagine, in the movies or anywhere else: the subject of an actual nuclear strike. It’s the subject which tests narrative forms and thinkability levels.
Maybe this is why we prefer to see it as something for absurdism and satire – a way of not staring into the sun – to remember Kubrick’s (brilliant) black comedy Dr Strangelove, with no fighting in the war room etc, rather than Lumet’s deadly serious Fail Safe.
Bigelow, with screenwriter Noah Oppenheim, broaches one of the most frightening thoughts of all: that a nuclear war could or rather will start with no one knowing who started it or who ended it. I watched this film with translucently white knuckles but also that strange climbing nausea that only this topic can create.
The drama is recounted in one 18-minute segment, repeated from various standpoints and various locations: 18 minutes being the time estimated to elapse between military observers reporting the out-of-the-blue launch of a nuke from the Pacific and its projected arrival in Chicago.
The action plays out in a series of situation rooms and command-and-control suites with acronyms like PEOC (Presidential Emergency Operations Center) featuring military and civilian personnel in banks of desks, generally in a shallow horseshoe shape facing a very big screen flashing up the threat level from Defcon 2 to Defcon 1 and also showing a large map displaying the missile’s current position, which is occasionally replaced with what amounts to a Zoom mosaic of tense faces belonging to high-ranking officials with no idea what to do, dialling in chaotically from their smartphones.
Rebecca Ferguson plays intelligence analyst Capt Olivia Walker, Tracy Letts is the gung ho military chief Gen Anthony Brady – this drama’s equivalent of the cold war’s Gen Curtis LeMay – who advocates an immediate pre-emptive counterstrike before the incoming missile arrives, Jared Harris is the defense secretary Reid Baker who realises that his estranged daughter is in Chicago, Gabriel Basso plays the brilliant and flustered young NSA adviser Jake Baerington who, if this was an Aaron Sorkin script, could be relied on to save the day.
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