The Movie: A House of Dynamite
The Director: Kathryn Bigelow
The Cast: Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts
The Story: When a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States, a race begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond.
The Rating: 5 / 10
The Review:
In my best Randy Jackson from American Idol voice: So, you gonna make a movie that tells me the same story three times and then doesn't give me an ending. Yeah, that's not gonna work for me, dawg.
This is the second movie I've watched this year dealing with weapons that tells the same story from multiple perspectives and, while one of them works pretty well (I haven't written my review yet, but you probably know what movie I'm talking about), the other falls so flat that it makes the non-ending ending that musch worse. I get why director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Noah Oppenheim took the route they did with this story, but still, you can't just leave us hanging like that because it just wasn't compelling enough to make me want to sit and contemplate on it myself.
Maybe also because what we're dealing with in real life is actually a little scarier than a nuclear threat so that could be another reason why the movie fell flat and just seemed unecessary. Do we really believe that the people in power right now would in any way be prepared for a nuclear attack? I mean, if an entire city is theatened with complete destruction, you can't just go on social media and blame each other for it, you actually have to do something about it.
Anyway, yeah this movie was frustrating for me although there were some good performances which helped a little bit. The problem with that though is the ones worth watching kept getting cut off because apparently we needed to see three different POV's of the same twenty some odd minutes play out. It's like, right when I was getting invested in a couple characters, the movie was like, oh hey, we're leaving them now and showing you some other people that were only on conference call screens a few minutes ago.
I guess my ranting here is a little spoilery and I'm sorry for that, but there's just no way for me to write an authentic review without laying it out the way I have. There's a good chance a lot of you will enjoy this movie for the all star cast and the tension that it does convey and hopefully none of that is lost from watching it at home on Netflix instead of getting a full theatrical experience.
I saw a conversation on social media the other day that talked about how movie and TV script writers are being told to "dumb down" their products because they know audiences are splitting their attention between their TV screen and their computer or phone screen and this movie really seems like a prime example of that. You only have to halfway pay attention for twenty minute intervals and then the same story gets repeated so by the end, maybe you caught enough of it to be mildly entertained.
Thank you, Netflix. I guess.
Thank you for reading this review. Here are reviews for two other Kathryn Bigelow movies that I think you would enjoy much more than this one:
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