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| Idris Elba in A House of Dynamite |
Cast: Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee, Jason Clarke, Malachi Beasley. Screenplay: Noah Oppenheim. Cinematography: Barry Ackroyd. Production design: Jeremy Hindle. Film editing: Kirk Baxter. Music: Volker Bertelmann.
Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite is a very smart movie that evidently went over some people's heads. A chorus of complaints about its ending followed its theatrical release and multiplied when it began streaming on Netflix. The complainers seem to have been expecting a conventional thriller like, for example, Crimson Tide, Tony Scott's 1995 movie about a nuclear threat that is averted at the last moment. Instead, what they got is a depiction of the potential for annihilation that comes from living in a world that is quite literally what the title of the film implies. I don't know what sort of conclusion the dissatisfied viewers might give to the situation depicted, which comes down to "surrender or suicide," as the adviser (Gabriel Basso) tells the president (Idris Elba). The film makes it seem possible that the fate of the world might depend on what it depicts as flimsy contingency plans, a few frightened government and military officials, and what the secretary of defense (Jared Harris) in the film calls "a coin toss." I watched A House of Dynamite on the day that our president announced that he was resuming tests of nuclear weapons, so I may have been more receptive to the movie's message than otherwise, but it still seems to me a well-made and terrifying film.
