A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow, 2025)
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brundlefly
- Joined: Fri Jun 13, 2014 4:55 pm
A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow, 2025)
Teasing Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite. With Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee, and Jason Clarke. And perhaps Carl Sagan.
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cantinflas
- Joined: Sat Dec 08, 2007 5:48 am
- Location: sydney
Re: Trailers for Upcoming Films
This looks so good. Some of the shots seem so alien, it's almost like sci-fi, and especially heightened by the Sagan voiceover. Can't wait.brundlefly wrote: Wed Sep 03, 2025 1:52 pm Teasing Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite. With Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee, and Jason Clarke. And perhaps Carl Sagan.
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Finch
- Joined: Mon Jul 07, 2008 9:09 pm
- Location: United States
Re: Trailers for Upcoming Films
This is the first decent trailer I've seen for anything (well, the first Longlegs teasers apart) in a long time. Shame it'll be buried on Netflix without a disc release, unless a Criterion producer likes the film well enough and can pry it loose.brundlefly wrote: Wed Sep 03, 2025 1:52 pm Teasing Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite. With Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee, and Jason Clarke. And perhaps Carl Sagan.
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hearthesilence
- Joined: Fri Mar 04, 2005 8:22 am
- Location: NYC
Re: The Films of 2025
A House of Dynamite isn't one of Bigelow's best films, but it's much better than I feared and more nuanced than some people made it out to be.
As most will already know without seeing it, the film is broken up into three parts, more or less presenting the same 18 minutes from a different perspective. Perhaps predictably, the first third is the most successful as a suspense film, but if you were like me, it will be infuriating for the way everything escalates to a nihilistic degree - not implausibly, but insanely nonetheless.
I've heard at least a few people claim that the rest of the film is a letdown because there's no real suspense when the film loops back on itself twice over, and regardless of whether you agree with this, the film does play as if the suspense is supposed to be there - the camerawork, editing and music all seem crafted with this in mind. But that wasn't the most important element for me - after seeing the film's nightmare scenario play out, what carried my interest afterwards was seeing how the world made such a nihilistic possibility a reality, and the film does this without being too didactic about it. It doesn't make the scenario any less insane, but with some background knowledge, you can see how the world set itself up for this, pushing itself into a corner through generations of poor national security policies. I could write a paper on this, but to get directly to the point, when you have a long history of normalizing mass casualties as a supposed necessity in order to maintain national security, you're setting yourself up for karmic atrocities in a way that's nearly irreversible. Some of the most sobering and potent moments are merely said in passing, but the film makes it clear that so much of national security is driven by overwhelming fear and a blood thirst for retribution - sometimes two separate things, sometimes the same - and unfortunately its those elements that frequently and reliably override morality and rationality.
I could go back and pick out the moments that exemplify this, but for now, I'll just stick to an offhand remark made by the President played by Idris Elba (and I'm actually going to go in a different direction and play it off a case where "cooler heads prevailed"): when presented with the option of not retaliating if a nuclear strike is limited to one city (a preferable scenario to total global destruction), he immediately dismisses the notion because the public wouldn't accept it, implying we'd want to fire back with nukes. At this point, they still have no idea who fired the missile or why (which includes the possibility of error) - basically initiating any countermeasure is accepted as entering into all-out war. Pretty fucking insane, but it also recalls crucial elements of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Kennedys believed that they couldn't achieve a peaceful resolution without allowing the USSR to save face, and indeed that tension constantly played out, where no one wanted to look like they were backing down or cowering before their direct adversary, and some of the most crucial demands were likely successful because they were presented by a third party like the UNSG rather than the U.S. A pretty damning statement about humanity, but that's a core principle about politics, and where the Cuban Missile Crisis was politics at its "best," the film basically shows the same forces leading the world in the opposite direction. (tbf, this is not a perfect comparison as one crisis involves the prevention of any nuclear launch and the fictional story at hand involves a missile that has already been launched.)
Some people have called the movie quaint, that it's no reflection of the current reality in American politics, but I feel this is overstated. Idris Elba's President (I don't recall him ever having a name in the film) is far from an ideal leader - instead of projecting a cool head and quick thinking, he comes off as a tired old man even before the crisis begins, and as soon as things begin to escalate, he never projects confidence or steadiness or anything remotely like the leadership I would hope from someone in his position, even if these are the worst circumstances imaginable. But even if he were presented as a steely intellectual, it's probably irrelevant - as I said before, the building escalation is clearly a reflection of a universal culture of revenge and retribution, again the driving force behind far too many disastrous national security policies on a tragic scale, and anyone following the news over the past 25 years should clearly recognize that.
As most will already know without seeing it, the film is broken up into three parts, more or less presenting the same 18 minutes from a different perspective. Perhaps predictably, the first third is the most successful as a suspense film, but if you were like me, it will be infuriating for the way everything escalates to a nihilistic degree - not implausibly, but insanely nonetheless.
I've heard at least a few people claim that the rest of the film is a letdown because there's no real suspense when the film loops back on itself twice over, and regardless of whether you agree with this, the film does play as if the suspense is supposed to be there - the camerawork, editing and music all seem crafted with this in mind. But that wasn't the most important element for me - after seeing the film's nightmare scenario play out, what carried my interest afterwards was seeing how the world made such a nihilistic possibility a reality, and the film does this without being too didactic about it. It doesn't make the scenario any less insane, but with some background knowledge, you can see how the world set itself up for this, pushing itself into a corner through generations of poor national security policies. I could write a paper on this, but to get directly to the point, when you have a long history of normalizing mass casualties as a supposed necessity in order to maintain national security, you're setting yourself up for karmic atrocities in a way that's nearly irreversible. Some of the most sobering and potent moments are merely said in passing, but the film makes it clear that so much of national security is driven by overwhelming fear and a blood thirst for retribution - sometimes two separate things, sometimes the same - and unfortunately its those elements that frequently and reliably override morality and rationality.
I could go back and pick out the moments that exemplify this, but for now, I'll just stick to an offhand remark made by the President played by Idris Elba (and I'm actually going to go in a different direction and play it off a case where "cooler heads prevailed"): when presented with the option of not retaliating if a nuclear strike is limited to one city (a preferable scenario to total global destruction), he immediately dismisses the notion because the public wouldn't accept it, implying we'd want to fire back with nukes. At this point, they still have no idea who fired the missile or why (which includes the possibility of error) - basically initiating any countermeasure is accepted as entering into all-out war. Pretty fucking insane, but it also recalls crucial elements of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Kennedys believed that they couldn't achieve a peaceful resolution without allowing the USSR to save face, and indeed that tension constantly played out, where no one wanted to look like they were backing down or cowering before their direct adversary, and some of the most crucial demands were likely successful because they were presented by a third party like the UNSG rather than the U.S. A pretty damning statement about humanity, but that's a core principle about politics, and where the Cuban Missile Crisis was politics at its "best," the film basically shows the same forces leading the world in the opposite direction. (tbf, this is not a perfect comparison as one crisis involves the prevention of any nuclear launch and the fictional story at hand involves a missile that has already been launched.)
Some people have called the movie quaint, that it's no reflection of the current reality in American politics, but I feel this is overstated. Idris Elba's President (I don't recall him ever having a name in the film) is far from an ideal leader - instead of projecting a cool head and quick thinking, he comes off as a tired old man even before the crisis begins, and as soon as things begin to escalate, he never projects confidence or steadiness or anything remotely like the leadership I would hope from someone in his position, even if these are the worst circumstances imaginable. But even if he were presented as a steely intellectual, it's probably irrelevant - as I said before, the building escalation is clearly a reflection of a universal culture of revenge and retribution, again the driving force behind far too many disastrous national security policies on a tragic scale, and anyone following the news over the past 25 years should clearly recognize that.