The ending of A House of Dynamite doesn’t quite live up to the rest of the star-studded Netflix movie.
Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, which is now streaming on Netflix, asks some big questions. What would happen if someone launched a nuclear missile at the United States? Do we retaliate? What if we don’t know who launched the missile? Do we just start launching our own, aimed at countries we don’t get along with?
Throughout the course of the movie, we hear from a number of different people who have various thoughts on what to do. These opinions are all explained thoroughly — blindly launching nuclear weapons at anyone and everyone may sound like a pretty bad idea, but Tracy Letts’ character has a great monologue explaining why doing nothing will just leave the United States open for more attacks. And, since we don’t know who launched that first missile, we can be pretty sure more attacks are probably coming.
How does A House of Dynamite end, and why doesn’t it work?
Ultimately, the decision of whether or not the United States will launch a counterattack has to be made by the President, played by Idris Elba. Elba’s character spends most of the last 20 minutes of the movie on the fence, trying to decide what the appropriate thing to do is. And then it ends. It ends without telling us what happens next. A hard cut to credits, meaning it’s up to the audience to decide what the fallout looks like (we don’t even know for sure if the missile headed to the United States detonated, as there’s talk about it potentially being a dud when it lands).
It’s a bold choice. A bold choice that, on some level, might make sense. We’re being presented with a situation that has no easy answers — having Elba’s character confidently go, “Yes, this is the right thing to do, I decide this,” would somewhat betray everything that we’ve just seen.
Yet, the decision to cut the movie off at that point also feels like a betrayal. We’ve just spent two hours getting to know these characters. This movie is more than just a hypothetical question posed to the audience; there’s some strong character work in letting us into the lives of people played by Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Anthony Ramos, Greta Lee, etc. And when the movie takes the time to build up these characters, places them in a situation where their lives are at stake, and then says, “But we’re not going to tell you what happens next,” it makes the whole thing feel incomplete.
Instead of presenting us with a scenario to discuss after the movie is over, it feels like it was designed just to pull the rug out from under audiences. There may not be any answers. But some sort of conclusion would have been nice.
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