**Warning: spoilers ahead**
A House Of Dynamite offers a terrifying glimpse of the US under nuclear attack, but does Idris Elba’s president retaliate? Find out below.
The latest film from Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty), it chronicles a realistic reaction from the US government chain of command to the launch of a single nuclear missile from an unidentified enemy.
Elba plays the President who is forced to make seismic decisions in a short period of time, while Rebecca Ferguson is Captain Olivia Walker, a senior officer in the White House Situation Room. Elsewhere, Gabriel Basso plays the Deputy National Security Advisor, Jared Harris is the Secretary of Defense and Tracy Letts is the General from US Strategic Command.
The film is streaming on Netflix now and you can watch the trailer here:
The film currently sits on a 78 per cent rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, with a consensus stating: “Playing out a nightmare scenario with nerve-wracking plausibility, Kathryn Bigelow’s masterfully constructed A House Of Dynamite is an urgent thriller that’s as distressing as it is riveting.”
After the film’s release, a Missile Defence Memo from the Pentagon denied one specific aspect of the film’s plot, arguing that the US’ missile interception technology has “displayed a 100 per cent accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade”, despite the film suggesting it was just a 61 per cent rate.
A House Of Dynamite ending explained: Does Idris Elba’s President retaliate to the nuclear attack?
The film is told in three distinct chapters, each one telling the story of the launch of the nuclear missile and the US government response to it, but from different perspectives.
In the third, subtitled ‘A House Filled With Dynamite’, we follow the President as he is informed of the crisis while giving a speech at a high school basketball event. Once it becomes apparent that the attempts to intercept the missile have failed, he is presented with the list of options at his disposal, including nuclear retaliation against the suspected perpetrators.
The President receives a range of advice from his advisors, including from the Deputy National Security Advisor, who has spoken with his Russian counterpart, believes they were not responsible, and argues for non-retaliation. Tracy Letts’ Strategic Command General, meanwhile, believes that not fighting back would amount to surrender and would likely encourage America’s enemies to strike again.
POTUS discusses the devastating effects of nuclear proliferation with his nuclear aide, comparing the current situation to living in “a house of dynamite”. With the clock ticking and Chicago apparently set to be wiped out by the missile, the President is presented with the full list of retaliation options, but as he is about to make his final decision, the screen cuts to black and we do not find out what happens next.
While the cliffhanger ending may prove frustrating for some audiences, screenwriter Noah Oppenheim explained to Radio Times: “We chose the ending we did because Kathryn and I both believed that any other ending would let the audience off the hook. We don’t want to give the audience a clean and neat resolution.”
“Any ending where the world is saved or the world is destroyed allows people to kind of walk out of the experience and say, ‘Okay, well, that’s that…. It ended that way, and it’s over, and I can go back to my everyday life.'”
He continued: “I think we’re trying to invite the audience to lean into a conversation, not about the specific scenario in this movie, but about the world in which we live. That regardless of what those characters decide, we walk out of the theatre or turn off the television, and we’re still in a world where there are several 1000 nuclear weapons, many of which are on a hair trigger. And is that a world we want to live in? We should all be participating in that conversation.”
English (US) · 