Netflix’s new original film, A House of Dynamite, arrived on the streaming platform Oct. 24. The nail-biter of a film depicts the tense 18 minutes after a missile is detected heading toward the United States. However, it purposefully leaves its ending ambiguous.
The new movie, helmed by The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow, unfolds between the missile’s launch and its potential detonation, as different sectors of government react to the threat and consider what the president of the United States (Idris Elba) should do next.
What happens in ‘A House of Dynamite’?
At Fort Greely, Alaska, Maj. Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) and his military team scramble to intercept the threat, while in the White House Situation Room, Capt. Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) coordinates intelligence and emergency response. Meanwhile, deputy national security adviser Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) attempts to deescalate the situation as the President weighs whether to retaliate against potential adversaries — something that Gen. Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts) insists is necessary to save the rest of the country. At the end of the film, Elba’s character is left making a decision from the “black book” of options for how to handle a nuclear threat.
Bigelow previously told Yahoo U.K. that the tight timeline — while the film runs for two hours, it only follows the 18 minutes of drama — was to show how difficult the decisions made by the people in the movie would be, putting the audience in the shoes of people like the president who must make “potentially catastrophic” choices.
The decision to tell the story in this way originated from the movie’s screenwriter Noah Oppenheim, the former president of NBC News and writer of the TV series Zero Day, which also revolves around an attack on the United States. “I wanted to do it in real time,” Bigelow said, noting that the choice to toggle back and forth between perspectives came about in part because “18 minutes would be a very short movie.”
How does ‘A House of Dynamite’ end?
While the film takes place entirely before the missile hits Chicago, it never reveals what happens when it does — and if the impact is as devastating as expected. However, even the threat of what may happen has caused irrevocable damage: Secretary of Defense Reid Baker, played by Jared Harris, jumps off the roof of the Pentagon when he learns that the plans to thwart the missile have failed. His daughter, played by Kaitlyn Dever, lives in Chicago, and he has one final phone call with her before he decides to take his own life.
The film also ends without showing what choice the president made on retaliation. Bigelow said in an interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that she hopes the ambiguous ending allows for an “opportunity to start a conversation.”
“I’d like to see people decide they don’t want to live in a world that’s this volatile or this combustible,” she said. “And then of course, the next step is to reach out to their representatives and try to, you know, create a movement.”
Still, not everyone is thrilled with the ambiguous ending, as evidenced by comments on Netflix’s Instagram post about the film.
“WTF was that ending!!!!!” one commenter wrote. Another added, “You can stop watching after 30 mins, nothing new happens with a crappy ending. Which is literally no ending.” A third wrote, “The movie is good, but the ending? We don’t know what happens…”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
