Kathryn Bigelow keeps doubling down on making these military thrillers which I think is a bit of a shame as I preferred her earlier, weirder work. I already knew going in that this wouldn’t be very good but I had to watch it anyway as it’s being talked about so much. Indeed, it is a very detailed procedural on how the US would respond to an unexpected nuclear missile so a lot of research must have gone into getting all of the agencies involved and the jargon right. Unfortunately the entire premise is unrealistic, it wastes all of its tension by showing the same set of events from three perspectives and in the end ducks out of having to say anything substantial at all.
Capt. Olivia Walker arrives at her job overseeing the White House Situation Room and is updated on the latest geopolitical developments. Then she notices on the screen an unidentified ICBM launch already in mid-flight. The team initially dismisses it as a North Korean test missile until it goes suborbital with a trajectory headed towards the continental United States. They initiate a video conference call to bring everyone into the loop and raise the alertness level to DEFCON 2. As the president is not immediately available, Secretary of Defense Reid Baker orders the implementation of the continuity of governance protocol, evacuating designated personnel to bunkers. Fort Greely at Alaska launches two ground-based interceptors in attempt to stop the ICBM but fails to score a hit. As the ICBM arrives closer, they narrow the target down to the city of Chicago. STRATCOM commander General Anthony Brady advises the president that it is time to consider retaliation options while Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington urges restraint as it still only a single ICBM that may yet turn out to be a dud and the US launching nukes of its own would surely result in Armageddon.
The above is a more or less complete summary of what happens in the film and we get the same story three times from different perspectives. The tension is thick at the beginning especially as everyone involved expects it to be just another routine day and is dumbfounded to find themselves suddenly thrust into the heart of a nuclear crisis. But once we recognize the pattern it establishes and realize that film only wants to set up the domino pieces but never lets us actually see them fall, all of the suspense is drained away. Small details like Captain Walker checking in her phone before she enters the Situation Room or advising a new co-worker what breakfast to order at the small kitchen in order to not hold up the line feel authentic. But they’re ultimately meaningless as they’re irrelevant to what actually happens and we never return to this character. I suppose it’s informative to see the procedures that the US have in place for a crisis play out but watching a FEMA official being surprised at having to be evacuated doesn’t add any insight to the logic of nuclear deterrence. Bigelow tries so hard to show us that all these people who are supposed to be in charge are human too and so react just like us in the face of the end of the world. But this kind of concerned handwringing is all that she does here and so the only lesson we can take away is the very trite “nuclear weapons are bad, m’kay?”
The worst part is that the scenario as presented is just not believable. It’s not plausible that an ICBM would be launched with the US having no idea where it came from. The pressure on the US president to immediately respond with nuclear launches of his own is non-existent. They’re only dealing with a single missile that is expected to hit a single city. As none of the US’s own nuclear arsenal is at risk, they retain their full capacity to respond whenever they want so the urgency shown here is purely made up. It’s laughable that once the missile is detected, they don’t try to deploy assets to discover where it came from or ask why their intelligence failed so spectacularly. They don’t even know what type of ICBM it is or seem to have considered that it might have multiple warheads. Not only is it ridiculous that the US would initiate Armageddon by blindly shooting nukes at all possible adversaries due to the loss of a single city, it’s dumb that people would start committing suicide out of despair when they haven’t even confirmed yet that it actually is a nuke or the extent of its damage even if it is one.
Bigelow’s previous thrillers similarly shared this wishy-washiness over both wanting to condemn the present status quo while also showing that there are no easy alternative solutions. This one unfortunately is the worst of the lot as they had to contrive an especially implausible scenario to create a false moral dilemma. It’s boring because it forces the viewer to go through the same events through multiple perspectives that add little new information. Even its humanizing touches fail to register because we know that these are throwaway characters that the film itself doesn’t really care about. It’s a slick production and feels superficially plausible, but this is not a good film at all.