Netflix’s new film A House of Dynamite has got everyone fuming as the ending was left on such a massive cliffhanger, and the creators have explained their reasoning behind the final scene.
The movie is set inside the US government, where officials have to come up with a quick plan as a nuclear missile is about to hit the city of Chicago, and Idris Elba plays the president.
People were hooked the whole way through, but left thoroughly disappointed when the film suddenly ended before the missile even hit, and many are saying it feels like there are scenes missing.
Speaking about her decision to end on such a huge cliffhanger, creator Kathryn Bigelow explained that they wanted to spark a conversation as nuclear weapons are a very real thing the world should be thinking about, not just something that happens in movies and gets neatly resolved.
“I felt like the fact that the bomb didn’t go off was an opportunity to start a conversation. With an explosion at the end, it would have been kind of all wrapped up neat, and you could point your finger [and say] ‘It’s bad that happened’. But it would sort of absolve us, the human race, of responsibility. And in fact, no, we are responsible for having created these weapons, and in a perfect world, getting rid of them,” she told Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Credit: Netflix
The film’s writer Noah Oppenheimer agreed, adding that people are so “numb to depictions of widespread destruction these days that they wanted to “take a different approach to trying to capture what this danger is”.
Bigelow also told Netflix’s Tudum: “I want audiences to leave theaters thinking, ‘Ok, what do we do now?’. This is a global issue, and of course I hope against hope that maybe we reduce the nuclear stockpile someday. But in the meantime, we really are living in a house of dynamite. I felt it was so important to get that information out there, so we could start a conversation. That’s the explosion we’re interested in — the conversation people have about the film afterward.”
In an interview with Radio Times, Oppenheimer claimed any other ending would have “let the audience off the hook” and they didn’t want to give people a “clean and neat resolution” which would allow people to go back to their normal lives.
He continued: “I think we’re trying to invite the audience to lean into a conversation, not about the specific scenario in this movie, but about the world in which we live. That regardless of what those characters decide, we walk out of the theatre or turn off the television, and we’re still in a world where there are several 1000 nuclear weapons, many of which are on a hair trigger.”
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Featured image by: Netflix
