Bugonia & A House of Dynamite

Let's start with House of Dynamite, the newest film from Catherine Bigelow, who brought you such films as Point Break, brought you such films as The Hurt Locker, which won Best Picture and Zero Dark Thirty.

So a movie like this, which features it's essentially a missile is coming to America.

And they don't know where it's from, but what kind of happens with the Situation Room and the Secretary of Defense and the President? What happens if something like a rocket were to be shot, a nuclear weapon were to be shot at America in major cities? And it's very interesting.

It's certainly in her wheelhouse of films, Catherine Bigelow.

Gareth, your immediate takeaway from the Netflix-released House of Dynamite.

Great performances narratively fell a little flat for me.

There's certain...

It was advertised to me as a serious movie, right? And it felt like a serious movie through probably the first third of it.

And then, without spoiling anything, there were certain cameos and certain narrative choices that felt very...

Almost corporatized, right? Like just to sell a movie on Netflix's end, like, hey, we actually want you to do this creatively because we want to shine a light on this person or this

actor.

You're speaking about, and we can spoil, you're speaking about, of course, Angel Reese has a cameo appearance in this.

I'm speaking about Angel Reese as a cameo.

I think what also, this is a minor nitpick on my part, Idris Elba and his involvement was slow played like he was Kaiser Soze.

And that's where I was just kind of like, narratively, what does this add? This doesn't feel like it aligns with What the movie is saying, which, again, at the end of the day, what the movie is saying, it's three different points of view of how the end of the world is going to work.

Right.

There is a nuclear bomb and there is three different viewpoints that we're getting in this movie, all converging and starting over from kind of, you know, the beginning of the situation, all converging to to spoil.

If we're if we're spoiling, we're spoiling.

May I?

Yes.

Spoilers! Spoilers!

So, you know, the movie ends without a trace of the nuke or knowing what happens.

And I've heard mixed things on the ending of this movie.

And I think my take aligns a little bit more negatively.

I understand the argument that you know like you need to leave that person the theater with a visceral reaction with some leaving with thought and with real conviction about what they saw but i'm also a big believer in finish what you start right we were we had a lot of characters a lot of moving pieces we knew the direction they were going i'm not saying we need to see the bomb go off from three different you know, viewpoints.