It seems clear to me that this was Bigelow’s intent (hereafter KB, an affectionate shorthand some of us who worked for her like to use). The tripartite story structure, which is not to be confused with the classic Hollywood 3-act nor, despite its shifts in POVs, with Rashomon, though it gestures toward the latter, is working toward something else altogether. The point is not to show how ambiguity besets differing perspectives or subjectivities, calling into doubt “the truth,” but how the most harrowing event imaginable plays out across a spectrum of experience and within the tight confines of a rigorous professionalism which is tested to the breaking point. It is also an ingenious method for ratcheting up suspense.
The repetitions build up tension to an unbearable level, then – fade to black. Each break occurs just as the missile is about to hit Chicago. Their effect is, as a friend put it, “devastating.” They give you no solace, no room to hide, absolutely no comfort or closure. It put me in mind of Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, which was meant to confound the audience’s expectations, to break them out of their complacency.
Because it’s Bigelow it is of course expertly crafted. The pacing is superb. The close up work unnerving. The way she holds on the silences in various command centers as the realization that the missile cannot be stopped as it sinks in in all its reality.
“This is insanity.” The President says (he’s not wrong) “No, Mr. President, this is reality.” A general replies (neither is he).
Always lauded for her dazzling action sequences, KB does not get enough attention or acclaim for the performances she draws from her cast. The first section places Rebecca Ferguson front and center. It’s a beautiful, restrained performance. There’s an anguished moment where she can barely hold back her tears as she thinks about her young son (whom we saw early on in a typical box-checking domestic scene).
Which raises a point of contention: do all the scenes establishing personal, intimate backstories (the President and his wife who’s on safari; the Deputy NSA guy with his pregnant wife) and so forth really add anything to the stakes? They come across as a bit labored and obvious. A sop to viewer sensibility.
Other cavils. Greta Lee’s performance as a North Korean expert who’s on a day trip with her son to Gettysburg is just too on the nose. And Jared Harris as a Sec Def who jumps off the Pentagon since his daughter lives in Chicago is overwrought. If you have nothing invested in a character emotionally then what boots it? The film stumbles here, I think, dialing up emotional hysteria rather gratuitously.
The always excellent Tracy Lett’s general lays out a concise range of scenarios as to the identity of the missile launcher, including one that involves a foreign power blinding one of our spy satellites before launching a missile – a more than plausible and frightening scenario.
Gabriel Basso dominates the second section, where he plays the Deputy NSA Jake Bearington. He’s an earnest Boy Scout type, pretty much the same character he played in “The Night Agent.” He’s a handsome hunk of beefcake but he is also quite good. His is the voice of moderation and de-escalation amid the chorus of brass hats who clamor for more bellicose responses to the maddeningly unidentified enemy. He plays noble frustration beautifully.Indeed, the film excels in its depiction of professionals performing difficult tasks under the most extreme pressure. The film is nothing if not Hawksian in that sense.
The final section brings us at last to Idris Elba’s POTUS—thus far only a voice. He is exhausted, a bit disheveled. Overwhelmed by the awfulness of the moment and the momentousness of the crucial decision he must make, he seems to crumble from within. It’s a wrenching, deeply human performance – he’s caught in an impossible moral crux. This section closes like the others. We don’t see the missile’s impact. POTUS is shuttled off to a bunker. We’re left to imagine the disaster, which is a brilliant move after so much build up. It puts the moral responsibility for imagining such an unthinkable event on the viewer. To have shown the missile strike would have robbed the film of its power, reducing it to just another inane spectacle of mass destruction, no better than an MCU film.
Above all, the film shows just how helpless we are in the face of our own awesome technologies. It’s not just the missiles that evoke horror, but the uselessness of the counter-measures.
One leaves the theater shaken, haunted. The Doomsday Clock is currently set at 89 seconds to midnight. And my students have never heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
