One morning, an intercontinental ballistic missile of unknown origin was detected to be airborne and bound to hit the continental USA. Based on its trajectory, it was projected to directly hit the city of Chicago in the next 16 minutes. Their first response was to launch two ground-based interceptors at it from Fort Greely, Alaska. When those failed to engage, the alert level was elevated further up and the issue of preemptive retaliatory attacks comes up.
This story was told in the point of view of three people at various levels of responsibility in such politico-military crisis. First was Capt. Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), the oversight officer for the White House Situation Room. Second was STRATCOM commander Gen. Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts) based in Nebraska. Finally, at the very top of the chain of command was the POTUS (Idris Elba) himself, who needed to give the final decision.
This film was directed by Kathryn Bigelow (after a 7-year hiatus), from an original screenplay by former NBC News president Noel Oppenheim. Bigelow will always be remembered as the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Director. This was for directing the tense Iraq War drama "The Hurt Locker" (2008), which also won Best Picture. Her next film was "Zero Dark Thirty" (2012) about the manhunt for Osama Bin Laden, which was also nominated for Oscars.
With this new film, Bigelow returns to this common theme of international conflict that she excelled in before. This time, the action is confined to US bases and Zoom meetings, as key American officials only had 16 minutes to make key decisions that will affect the whole world. Bigelow built up suspense as she showed these same 16 minutes from three vantage points, revealing more strategic details and personal drama as the story unfolded.
Therefore, for each of the three chapters of this film, we are left in a cliffhanger as to what the final decision of the POTUS was. This was quite the major build up in the final chapter as Lt Comm Robert Reeves (Jonah Hauer-King) quickly briefed the POTUS (and us) about his three options, all of which will entail a major casualty count. Then after all that suspenseful triple build-up came a ending that will polarize viewers. Was that astute brilliance? or a frustrating cop-out? 8/10
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