Idris Elba as the unnamed U.S. president in “A House of Dynamite.”
Netflix
A House of Dynamite filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow and Noah Oppenheim are explaining why their new Netflix nuclear thriller has an open-ended conclusion.
Starring an ensemble cast that includes Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso and Jared Harris, A House of Dynamite opened in limited release in theaters on Oct. 10 to qualify for awards season consideration, including the Oscars.
The film — which also stars Anthony Ramos, Tracy Letts, Moses Ingram, Willa Fitzgerald, Jonah-Hauer King, Jason Clarke, Kaitlyn Dever, Renee Elise Goldsberry and Greta Lee — made its streaming debut on Netflix on Oct. 24.
Directed by Bigelow and written by Oppenheim, A House of Dynamite begins in the Situation Room of the White House, when Capt. Olivia Walker (Ferguson) is alerted by personnel stationed at Fort Greely outside of Fairbanks, Alaska, that an intercontinental ballistic missile of an unknown origin is soaring over the Pacific Ocean and is heading for the United States.
With only 18 minutes before the nuclear warhead strikes the U.S., Walker and her team hastily arrange a meeting between the unnamed U.S. president (Elba), the secretary of Department of Defense (Harris), the combatant commander of United States Strategic Command (Letts), the deputy National Security advisor (Basso) and other top officials to determine how to respond to the pending catastrophe.
Note: Spoiler details are discussed throughout the rest of this article.
Kathryn Bigelow Says She Designs Her Films For Audiences To Ask Questions
Rated R, A House of Dynamite is a non-partisan story told from three points of view — through the White House Situation Room, the deputy NSA official and the president — as the clock winds down to mere minutes before the missile strike. During each of the segments, the same actions that are detailed in the opening and second acts are presented from different vantage points.
The film has stirred up controversy (via Variety) with viewers over its ambiguous ending. Essentially, while each of the three acts in the film brings viewers to the brink of the missile strike that will annihilate a major U.S. city — which is revealed to be Chicago — the film ends by showing people selected to ride out the catastrophe heading for a nuclear fallout shelter.
As such, A House of Dynamite does not show the missile striking Chicago, nor does it chronicle whether the president decides to hold off on a counterattack or launch it before the missile hits. If the president decides the latter, the action will plunge the globe into World War III and bring about a nuclear apocalypse.
The timing of the counterattack decision is crucial, given that the president is tasked with making the decision before the ICBM hits Chicago, despite being informed that the missile could potentially malfunction and not go off.
Discussing the film with The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday, Kathryn Bigelow and Noah Oppenheim, among other things, answered criticism by the Pentagon that the film was inaccurate in its portrayal of the frailties of the country’s nuclear missile defense system.
In addition, Bigelow and Oppenheim confronted the controversy about the film’s ambiguous ending and gave their reasoning behind it.
“Kathryn and I wanted the movie to invite the audience to lean in the end, to not kind of give anyone an easy out or tie it up with a bow,” Oppenheim told THR. “We wanted to instigate reflection and conversation, and we both give a lot of credit to Netflix for letting Kathryn make the movie that she envisioned from the very beginning.
“As the ending is driving people to talk more about this subject, it’s exactly what we hoped for,” Oppenheim added.
Bigelow, who won an Oscar for Best Director for helming the 2008 war thriller The Hurt Locker, said it has never been her intention to make films that answer everything for their audiences.
“I tend to start films with a question, or I certainly have recently anyway,” Bigelow told THR. “With Hurt Locker, it was: ‘What is the methodology of the insurgency in Iraq and the bloodiest part of the war? In Zero Dark Thirty, why did it take 10 years to find Osama Bin Laden?’ In this one, the film in itself poses a question that then gives the audience an opportunity to answer.”
According to Netflix’s weekly Global Top 10 Movies chart released on Tuesday, A House of Dynamite scored 22.1 million views — which equates to 42.4 million hours viewed — in its first three days of release on the streaming platform, which helped secure the top spot of the global chart. The film, Netflix noted, also topped the Netflix movie charts in 39 countries, including the U.S.