War Poetry

At a time of global uncertainty, a feature-length drama illuminates the moral arguments a US Presidency might face when responding to a nuclear attack. It has a literary title and comes from a new, premium television platform. Those words describe A House of Dynamite (2025), directed by Kathryn Bigelow and currently on limited cinema release before streaming on Netflix, but also By Dawn’s Early Light (1990), directed by Jack Sholder months before the fall of the Berlin Wall and shown on HBO the year after. They are eloquent articulations of our ultimate fear, yet reveal a diversity of approach rooted in their makers’ backgrounds.

A nuclear strike on the continental United States is the shared scenario, prompting heated and in one case violent disagreement about the correct reaction. Of course, the opposition between hawks advocating total destruction of the enemy and doves pleading for a painful but limited compromise has been explored cinematically before, most famously in Stanley’s Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe (both 1964), but television companies lacked both the appetite and the means to address the subject until the Eighties, whilst cable companies like HBO that were not bound by network standards were in the ascendant. This was also the time of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (‘Star Wars’), the ongoing conflict in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan  and the impending fortieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan. And whilst the Cold War might have ended in 1991 with the dissolution of the USSR, today’s intensely complex world of repressive states, nuclear proliferation and unending ethnic and religious conflicts remains distressingly familiar ground.

Sholder and Bigelow are near-contemporaries now in their seventies, so it is perhaps unsurprising that they would at some point engage with the threat of nuclear annihilation, one of the four great concerns that bedevilled post-war America along with civil rights, Vietnam and Watergate. That they did so at either side of the twenty five years since the end of the Cold War reflects their differing career paths, as does the distinctive ways they tell their stories.

Sholder studied English literature at Edinburgh and was also passionate about music before becoming hooked on film. Moving back to the States, he made a number of shorts and after graduation started as an editor for New Line Cinema, then a distribution company for foreign and arthouse material but later a studio in its own right. With no formal education in film, Sholder taught himself what he needed to know from watching the works of others. His own feature debut was Alone in the Dark in 1982, which led to directing the successful sequel A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985) and the cult sci-fi action-horror The Hidden (1987). Later work included Renegades (1989) but also the well-regarded 12:01 (1993) for the Fox Network. In 2004 he founded the Motion Picture Production Program at Western Carolina University, within which faculty he taught for nearly fifteen years.

Bigelow had a cultured early education before enrolling as an art student. After spending time as a struggling but well-connected painter, she joined a graduate film programme where she was particularly engaged in the theory of film and its criticism. Experimental shorts followed, leading to her feature debut The Loveless in 1981. She quickly became known for her convention-bending films Near Dark (1987), Blue Steel (1990) and Point Break (1991), a trio of double-punch titles who genre inversions struck a chord with audiences and established her cinematic credentials. Her more recent films have included The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), both controversial in their treatment of American misadventure abroad, and she has also directed episodes for television.

With this pair of films, then, there are similarities – both follow the same events from multiple viewpoints, for example – but also fundamental differences, which start with the scripts.

Jack Sholder’s film is adapted by Bruce Gilbert from a 1983 novel by William Prochnau, Trinity’s Child; Kathryn Bigelow’s film is written by Noah Oppenheim from a concept she developed herself. Oppenheim‘s script is about the dilemma of uncertainty in the context of limited information, whereas Gilbert‘s script quickly resolves that problem into two clearly-conflicted camps who weaponise their credos.

Sholder, brought up at the populist, energetic New Line and who has stated that his ability to edit to tell a story is the secret of any success he has had, employs a conventional structure with the various narrative threads moving forward simultaneously as the audience returns to them. This builds suspense for the thriller element of the plot, and delivers an inevitable and powerful climax. Bigelow, informed by the ethos of a painter, rewinds the story to the beginning each time to position her focus on a different character. The audience re-evaluates their earlier reactions in the light of new information not available the first time around, enhancing the philosophical elements of the story.

The principal cast of Sholder’s film comprises several stars of its time – Powers Boothe, Rebecca De Mornay – as well as character actors such as Martin Landau and Darren McGavin. Boothe’s world-weariness as a bomber pilot and Landau’s sincerity as the beleaguered President are particularly effective. The principal name in Bigelow’s film is Rebecca Ferguson as the head of the White House situation room, though her fame and skill unbalance the first act, working as she is with an almost unknown supporting cast although ultimately Idris Elba delivers by far the best performance in the film.  

Production design is vital when trying to establish a convincing representation of a world hidden from the audience by time or circumstance. Here, the most visible aspects of that discipline are weighted toward those aspects of each story that were unachievable in reality. For Sholder, a significant portion of his screentime involves military aircraft in flight and, at crucial moments, in conflict; the scenes were created using the then-current technique of models moved by computer-controlled camera and photo-chemically composited into realistic backgrounds; the effect does not always work, even viewed at the time, but it serves the story well enough. For Bigelow, who opens out her canvass in the final third of the film from bunkers and control rooms to the streets of Washington, DC and the skies above it, wrangling practical vehicles and digital technology puts at her disposal two forms of Presidential transport that are familiar from news footage but impossible to access – the Beast and Marine One. The result is highly impressive.

And those titles? Both are quotes. The phrase ‘by the dawn’s early light’ is found in the first line of Francis Scott Key’s poem about the successful defence by the Americans of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. Key scribbled the line whilst watching the ineffective British bombardment, later adding more to form what became the lyrics of The Star-Spangled Banner, the national anthem of the United States (it is not coincidental that Key’s second line generated the title of another film thriller about nuclear weapons, Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977), though here the theme is actually the Vietnam War rather than the Cold War. The subject of both lines is the ‘stars & stripes’ flag, still flying over the Baltimore fort). In Bigelow’s film, a character mentions hearing a podcast containing the line “a house filled with dynamite” as a pointed metaphor for the dangerous position the world’s nuclear states have built for themselves and the rest of humanity. In fact the line appears to be an invention either of Oppenheim or Bigelow, who said at the film’s Venice premiere that “we are really living in a house of dynamite.”

Literary allusions aside, the terse, seemingly impenetrable but – to those who understand what it represents – terrifying jargon of military and governmental abbreviations generates its own rhythms. Both films deploy this densely coded conversation, whether Kneecap, Alice and Looking Glass or MIRV, EKV and PEOC; what comic book writer and artist and software designer Mike Saenz called rolling techno-poetry.

Bigelow’s film is an absorbing and ultra-realistic depiction of the tensions that would undoubtedly arise if her scenario came to pass. It builds through the second and third acts to a climax that, though it stops tantalisingly short of what the audience might expect, leaves a lasting impression. Sholder’s film is the more gripping thanks to its linear, propulsive design, clever twists and his sure handling of the medium, with an economy of means that cleverly works within the budget but allows some nicely cinematic moments especially at the climax.

Importantly, both have ambiguous endings and both are lyrical but sombre warnings that we have yet to heed, it seems.