I watch A House of Dynamite over the weekend, I thought I had put out this post early this week. Honestly I dont know how some are calling this Netflix best movie of the year, for me this movie makes me feel mostly frustration being completely honest. The thing is this movie starts so damn strong with all these government people are trying to figure out what the hell to do when a nuclear missile gets launched at the United States and NOBODY knows who did it or why it happened in the first place. Maybe like the first thirty minutes was intense as fuck, director Kathryn Bigelow seem to know very well how to make you feel the pressure and the chaos, like you are sitting right there in the room with Rebecca Ferguson and Idris Elba, and all these other people who are about to lose their minds. The cast is absolutely loaded too and may be why I was expecting way more, you got Jared Harris, Anthony Ramos, Gabriel Basso, Tracy Letts is there being all serious, Moses Ingram also shows up for a bit and honestly everybody is doing solid work, making it feel believable and scary as hell. But then somewhere around the middle, the movie does this annoying thing where it keeps jumping back in time, to show you the exact same events but from different peoples point of view, for me it just killed all that momentum, they spent so long building up in the beginning. I understand what Bigelow was trying to accomplish here, showing how all these separate groups of people who are dealing with the same crisis, at the same exact moment but it just made me start losing interest real quick because I kept waiting for something new to happen and nothing like we are running in circles, just the same stuff over and over again, from slightly different angles.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32376165/
- Platform: NETFLIX
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The whole setup is pretty straightforward when you break it down, a nuclear warhead gets detected mid flight, heading straight for Chicago where like ten million plus people live and work, and everyone in power has maybe eighteen minutes to figure out if they can stop it, who launched it?? whether they should blow somebody else up in return??. Rebecca Fergusons character Olivia Walker works the room trying to get answers and figure this whole thing out and shes basically our main eyes into this mess for that first chunk of the movie, shes got a sick kid at home, who needs to see a doctor but she also has to get to work, because of how important is her job on this entire situation. This is where things work out at first because you can tell how she has to make decisions based on her family and everyone else, you cant be selfish here because they all might get evaporated, while shes trying to do her job and save millions of other families I cant stop thinking how does that feel as anyone else mind would be split in two sides when it comes to who is first, her family or the rest of the city??. I do not think the government would tell regular people that a nuke is about to land on a major city because that would cause total chaos in the streets. The movie does a good job making you think about that kind of stuff, like what would really go down if this scenario played out in real life, would we even know until it was too late or would there be some kind of warning, that most likely would be too late and still create total chaos.
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The problem starts when the movie goes over half an hour in, and things are getting really tense, like they want to start to recicle the scene, because the missile might actually hit, and people might actually die, and then boom it cuts to black and jumps back to the start of the same time period, but now we are seeing it through different characters eyes, at different levels of the government, in different locations. All that tension just evaporates instantly, it stops being as interesting as it goes along because you kind of feel like you have been there and done that already, you know exactly what is going to happen, every step until a certain point, because you literally just watched it happen twenty minutes ago. The movie never really spends enough time with any one specific characters to have some proper character building and make you care or root for them, so by the time you get to the final thirty or forty minutes, you are just going with the flow, waiting for it to end, I watch this with my wife and that was her very first critic after the movie ended. It honestly feels like this would have worked way better, as a thirty minute short movie or maybe just a different structure entirely, if the whole thing was just that first segment, playing out in real time without jumping around, I probably would have loved it, because that part was very well done with tons of tension building until that cut to black moment. Instead we get this back and forth time jump thing and I know Im starting to rant but Im so disappointed, three separate times I had to watch the same story play over, from the Pentagon, then from some general trying to get intel on the missile, then from the president played by Idris Elba trying to make an impossible decision. I have always thought jumping back and forward in time on a movie makes it interesting but they just abuse this hack, because this usually comes with awesome discoveries or hidden details about the characters decisions, but this time it does not make up for how repetitive and drawn out it all feels.
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Now the ending, that was fucking disappointing, after everything that came before it the movie just kind of stops, it does not end it just stops and showed directed by Kathryn Bigelow, it was a very big WTF moment for me like where the rest go?? thats how we are ending this thing??. It wraps up and was so unsatisfying that leaves you with nothing, no resolution, no payoff, no emotional punch and that is not something you expect from Kathryn Bigelow, because I remember her because of the best endings in movies I have seen is Zero Dark Thirty, where the final moments are absolutely perfect and leave you with such gratification. Instead we just get an ambiguous cut to black, where we never find out if Chicago gets destroyed, we never find out what the president decides to do about retaliation, we just see some FEMA person played by Moses Ingram, arriving at some nuclear bunker in Pennsylvania, which I guess means something bad happened but who knows. The movie needed way more suspense in that final half hour. There are also way too many characters crammed into this thing for how short it is, making the movie splinter too much, by the end I felt like I did not really know anybody in the story, because we never spent enough quality time, with any single person for them to stick in your memory. I look this one up and it seems that both Noah Oppenheim and Kathryn Bigelow agree on this ending on purpose to "force" the discussion about nuclear weapons and everything in between, but honestly WTF this is not a documentary, you want to push that kind of message and spark that kind of conversation do it with other type of material, I fkn hate it because everything started so good.
A House of Dynamite had a great formula from the start, a stacked cast doing great work, a terrifying premise that feels so good with real life problems given the world we live in today, and a director who knows how to build tension based on her previous work. But then it shoots itself in the foot with this repetitive structure that drains all the energy that is has generated for the first half hour and an ending that feels like they just gave up or ran out of ideas or as some articles online mention they did it on purpose to spark up a conversation of Nuclear Weapons proliferation, I wanted to love this movie so bad but it just could not stick the landing, I honestly thought I was about to watch something special with Rebecca Ferguson calling the shots. If you got Netflix and you got some time to kill, I would say give it a watch because its not terrible and Bigelow does not make movies very often so its worth watching he work, but go in with lower expectations than you normally would for Rebecca Ferguson and maybe you will not be as let down as I was. For me this sits somewhere in the middle, not good enough to recommend but not bad enough to tell people to skip it entirely, its just kind of meh, which is probably the worst thing a movie about nuclear war can be. I am giving it a six out of ten, maybe a seven if I am feeling generous, but damn I really hoped for so much more from this one.
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