A House Of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow, October 24, 2025, Netflix) Movie • Page 3

It's funny to think back to 2009 when the big Oscar battle was the scrappy little indie The Hurt Locker versus the evil blockbuster Avatar. Now Avatar is regarded as among the best blockbusters amid the glut of superhero movies and Bigelow has made more and more right-wing adjacent movies.

What is in this movie that wasn't said better in Dr. Strangelove 60 years ago? Other than Stringer Bell's brief story (the President saying "I was listening to a podcast" is great unintentional comedy), the film doesn't really try to reckon with the precarious nature we live in during this seeming neo-Cold War. It is all about process, and for some reason people fetishize accuracy and authenticity versus storytelling, themes, and messaging. We might be seeing a changing of the guard; while young directors like Aster and Cregger and Coogler released arguably their best films this year, Bigelow and Guillermo del Toro took the seemingly endless Netflix money and delivered work that makes you realize how long ago it has been since they were actually great. Apparently Bigelow had a movie between this and the "torture is good, actually" Zero Dark Thirty?

The Angel Reese cameo wasn't awful and they were wise not to make her act too much, but it felt like it became an Adam Sandler movie.

 

I stand by that this was entertaining and performances were good. However I see the issues people had with it and definitely falls apart when you think about it critically.

 

It is entertaining in that "the third largest city in America is about to be destroyed" is going to keep you wanting to see what will happen but that is an easy thing to pull off. It pulls you to that precipice three different times and then it just ends. What, then, was it all for? Was it just supposed to be a political science lesson on the what ifs? Other than people calling their spouses the only real dramatic drive is Lane Pryce and his daughter, which is not even that compelling because he is in the film briefly and she is in it even less.

 

I don't want to talk too much about the ending to a different movie outside of its thread, but compare the way this ends to the gratification to the ending of Weapons. Imagine if Weapons ended when the cop went in the house and we had no idea what happened.

 

Ending stunk

 

as soon as I started watching this and figured out what the schtick was, I assumed it was going to end where it did*

* although without that weird and insanely extraneous very last scene that shows people entering the bunker

there was no way this was ever going to turn into a Roland Emmerich disaster flick and show us Chicago and the whole world getting nuked

 

The book definitely had a more interesting premise

 

I talked to someone about this movie at dinner and it just made me angrier. There is something very perverse about America so often making movies where we are under attack. While Russia is indeed often invading and brutalizing people, films like this and the Red Dawn remake suggest China and North Korea are involved, but when is the last time they invaded or attacked anyone? The truth is that if you are running from a bomb anywhere on this planet that bomb was probably sent by the United States or financed and backed by the United States. It is like how local news stories create the impression that the streets are filled with criminals and murder despite the decades-long decline in crime nationwide.

Dr. Strangelove is such a raw critique of the arrogance and short-sightedness of both of the world powers at the time, but here America is just some helpless victim. They literally did nothing wrong, and other than the suicide of the Secretary of Defense everyone just goes along with their job pretty professionally.