Director Kathryn Bigelow’s first movie in eight years plays to her strengths with a dynamite ensemble cast trying to process a ticking clock of doom and their dwindling options. It’s an incredibly taut and thrilling movie elevated by Bigelow’s penchant for later-career verisimilitude. A nuclear missile is launched from an Asian country (North Korea? Russia? It’s never clarified) and heading for the American Midwest. The movie replays the chain of events three times and in real-time, first with the initial discovery of the missile and those in charge of launching counter defenses to take it out (a character describes the difficulty as “shooting a bullet with a bullet”). Then with the higher military brass debating whether to launch pre-emptive strikes against foreign countries making moves. Finally, with the president who hasn’t been seen up until this point, keeping the identity of the actor a surprise. He has to make the final decision of what to do as the missile looms and loss of life seems inevitable. I was fairly enthralled by the immediate pacing and the fraught conversations over doomsday planning. It felt like a modern-day and terrifying version of Fail Safe. There’s even room for some human stories here as people contemplate what might be the end, like trying to reach a loved one by phone and summarize a lifetime of feelings for closure, or debating whether or not to stay or leave the incoming danger. Because of the repeated structure of the screenplay, it holds out the missile striking or not striking until the very end. What will the president do? Is it as another character dubs a choice between suicide and surrender? And then…

Spoiler…

the movie just ends. I’m spoiling to protect you, dear reader. It’s not an ambiguous ending. There is no ending. There is no conclusion. I was flabbergasted. It’s like they lopped off the last twenty minutes. How could they do this? It completely ruins the movie for me and the whole experience becomes one of those distaff “we just want you to think” experiments that don’t function as a fully-developed movie. A House of Dynamite (coined from a podcast the president listened to) is a thriller that goes up in smoke.

Nate’s Grade: B-