A lot has been said about Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite since the Netflix original movie hit the streamer back in October. Though critics said the movie packed a wallop with its exploration of a doomsday scenario in the moments leading to nuclear war, audiences have had some serious gripes with the final minutes. However, legendary filmmaker James Cameron is singing a different tune.
When speaking with The Hollywood Reporter shortly after his own much-talked-about recent film, Avatar: Fire and Ash, blew up the box office, Cameron took time to defend Kathryn Bigelow, his fellow filmmaker and former wife, and her decision to end the movie the way she did. Recalling a conversation the pair had over dinner a few weeks after A House of Dynamite hit the 2025 movie schedule, Cameron says:
I said to her, ‘I utterly defend that ending.' It’s really the only possible ending. You don’t get to the end of [the classic short story] ‘The Lady or the Tiger?‘ and know what’s behind which door.
For those who haven’t either forgotten or overlooked the riveting thriller starring Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba and a who’s who of character actors, A House of Dynamite’s ending leaves a lot unresolved. Did the nuclear warhead turn Chicago into a nuclear wasteland? Did the United States retaliate? Is the world destroyed?
We don’t really get the answers, but Cameron believes that learning the fate of the world and seeing the bombs explode isn’t “really the point” of the film. As he explains:
But that’s not even really the point. The point is: From the moment the scenario began at minute zero, when the missile was launched and detected, the outcome already sucked. There was no good outcome, and the movie spent two hours showing you there is no good outcome. We cannot countenance these weapons existing at all. And it all boils down to one guy in the American system, the president, who is the only person allowed to launch a nuclear strike, either offensively or defensively, and the lives of every person on the planet revolve around that one person. That’s the world we live in, and we need to remember that when we vote next time.
It can be argued that this point is driven home with the subtlety of a hammer in the third and final act of A House of Dynamite, as Idris Elba’s President of the United States (he is unnamed in the movie) grapples with the idea of launching a retaliatory attack while not knowing who put Chicago, and America at large, in its crosshairs and why.
Comments like this coming from Cameron are nothing new, as the director has long touched on the dangers of unchecked nuclear power (and technology in general) with his Terminator franchise and other movies, like The Abyss and True Lies. That said, it should come as no surprise when the filmmaker opened up on how to win a nuclear war:
So the end of that movie was the only way that movie could have ended because — as the computer says at the end of War Games — ‘The only way to win is not to play.
Based on Cameron’s comments about A House of Dynamite and nuclear war in general, it will be interesting to see how he handles the subject whenever he starts shooting the long-in-the-works Ghosts of Hiroshima book-to-screen adaptation. However, that project, along with the fate of his Avatar franchise, is currently in limbo until Fire and Ash finishes its run at the box office.
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