A House of Dynamite
Netflix
Netflix has had a new #1 movie for a while now, its original feature A House of Dynamite, a political thriller directed by Zero Dark Thirty’s Kathryn Bigelow, starring Rebecca Ferguson and Idris Elba, documenting the panicked reaction of the US to a missile being launched at the homeland.
A House of Dynamite starts as an engaging feature, but midway through it takes a confusing turn, and then its ending is a crashed plane on a runway after failing to stick its landing. Spoilers follow.
The movie is oddly structured, replaying the 20 or so minutes while the missile is in flight among two different sets of government agencies, then finally from the President’s perspective. The result here is a movie that repeats all of its dialogue two or three times, with the other perspectives adding little after the first, mostly just the other end of a Zoom call we’ve already heard. But you think it might all be worth it when they converge in the end, the moment the missile may or may not make impact, and the President may or may not authorize retaliation against effectively the entire rest of the world, as throughout the film, they never figure out who shot the missile in the first place.
Then, credits. At this key moment, the film ends.
A House of Dynamite
Netflix
This has been sold as “the point,” where you’re not supposed to know if the missile could be a dud, or who shot it, or what the President does in that critical moment. It’s supposed to be something that goes either way, and that no matter what happens, the world is changed.
Sorry, but that doesn’t make the ending any less frustrating. Sitting through three different versions of the same situation is only tolerable with an actual ending, not Bigelow throwing up her hands and saying, “You interpret it!” I wanted to know how she was going to resolve the balance between all these wild factors to reach an ending, catastrophic or otherwise, but the further you get in the movie, the less likely that seems. And then, of course, the answer is to simply not have an ending at all.
The whole idea that you never have any clue who shot the missile is bizarre. There are hints that there could be some sort of insider/cyber interference to blind a satellite that was supposed to catch the launch, but there’s no time to figure any of that out. So, the answer is a blind strike to blow up the rest of the world, or letting a city (probably) blow up without retaliation. An impossible choice. So impossible the movie is afraid of making it, and just saying “that’s the point” and hand-waving it away. Poor form.
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/10/29/why-netflixs-a-house-of-dynamite-ending-is-extremely-frustrating/
