A House of Dynamite (2025)
Kathryn Bigelow Imagines America Without Trump
Benji and Luke begin the show by presenting context for Kathryn Bigelow’s career to date and their expectations for her first film since 2017 and her first since 2002 without long-time screenwriter, Mark Boal. They then provide an assessment of the cultural relevance of A House of Dynamite along with a spoiler free plot summary of the movie.
They follow with a breakdown of themes and key moments from the movie along with audience feedback from their screening. Finally, they briefly discuss Bigelow’s 2017 movie, Detroit, and use that to set up their takeaways about Bigelow’s role as a Trump era director.
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A House of Dynamite (2025) — Kathryn Bigelow | Full Episode Transcript
From an ensemble of very serious actors. The undisputed queen of Obama-era foreign policy movies, and the guy who almost single-handedly quashed Ronan Farrow's investigation into Harvey Weinstein comes a movie about the biggest threat to humanity of our time. wait, did I say our time? I meant the biggest threat to humanity in the year I was born. 1981. The movie is called A House of Dynamite. This podcast is called All Those Moments. I'm Benji Wade. And I'm Luke Baumgarten.
All those moments is a podcast built around connecting social, political, or cultural moments to moments from our favorite movies. This is not one of our favorite movies, but Luke, let's talk about why we chose this movie for the podcast or why we choose them in general. We're generally speaking going after filmmakers who we enjoy or find intriguing, whether it's somebody whose movies we've seen before, like Kathryn Bigelow. Or it's somebody whose movies have never been made before, like Carson Lund or most recently Julian Glander. We also try to tie in some form of social political cultural relevance because you and I tend to both be a bit, would you describe us as culture vultures of sorts?
I think so, yeah. I don't even think I know what that term means, but I've just used it. If we're using that term in the way you think it is meant to be used, and I am, then yes, we are. I also think cultural relevance, it's equally okay because we've this has now happened to us couple times. Cultural irrelevance isn't okay for a thing for us to talk about if it's a movie that's not particularly relevant to our moment. And that's what this I think fits into. There's there's like a meter to this. There's a kind of a continuum, and we're gonna find where these films sit on the spectrum of relevance. Yeah. In the case of this movie, the last Kathryn Bigelow movie was in twenty seventeen. Yeah.
It was called Detroit. Neither of us had heard of that movie. At all. Yeah, but I watched it and I'm I took that bullet for the team. You went and watched one battle after another twice. By all accounts, I would say that Kathryn Bigelow kind of went on a self-imposed of sorts director's jail after making Detroit and then resurfaces to make a house of dynamite. So I just want to ask you, Luke, what did you think when I suggested when talking to our friends at the Magic Lantern that we do an episode about A house of dynamite on all those moments.
So, like my thing with Kathryn Bigelow is like I actually love Point Break, which was one of her first movies and Strange Days I was like weirdly into when I was in high school. I think of her as like literally, I came into my knowledge of her with starting with a Hurt Locker and basically ending with Zero Dark Thirty, which was like Hurt Locker. I haven't you rewatched it or and I haven't, but I remember it being like this very somber, solemn, kind of terrifying look at.
specifically IEDs in Iraq. And like the the horror, the individual horror and the process of like being a guy who's diffusing bombs. Not even a two like a two-hander is kind of like a one-hander about this guy and his psychological, you know, battle with this thing. Maybe a two-hander if you can't Anthony Mackey in their relationship. Because it's 'cause they are like a partnership. Yeah, yeah. They are. And it has a little bit of the Swayze and Keanu sort of a vibe from point break. There, there's a lot of like Hmm, vaguely homoerotic energy going on between the two of them.
There's a big fight scene that they have where they like wrestle each other and like the Jeremy Renner character rides the Anthony Mackey character like a bull. Yeah. I just rewatched the movie, by the way. I had the same impression you did. It was a I remember thinking that movie kicked ass. Yeah. And it still kicks ass, which we will talk about that movie at the end of this podcast. But yeah. And then zero so then she gets all of these plaudits for sort of like really sort of Showing the horrors of a contemporary war of a sort. And we're going to talk about how there's also some like rah-rah stuff at the end that's a little weird totally for you.
I think what like the Obama administration would want you to sort of think back on that time as being like serious people making hard decisions about bad men and what to do with it to keep our country safe, right? Like a very a marrowcentric pro, like wars are bad, but we do them well sort of a thing, which was very much. Obama's brand of like how he executed global conflict. So that was like a little bit of a throat clearing to just be like when you said Kathryn Bigelow, I was like, my God, like she couldn't feel more out of time to me because I didn't even know Detroit was a movie she made. Yeah.
And I was just like, What how is the definitive Obama era, you know, foreign policy director gonna even approach the Trump era? And the answer was like by pretending it's still the Obama era? Yeah. Yeah. That's exact that's a perfect description. Or we're gonna bring back a proxy of Obama when we cast the president in this movie. Yeah. All I knew was that it was Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, it was some sort of law enforcement slash political thriller. I thought maybe just from seeing I don't even think I'd seen a full trailer, but I was just catching glimpses. I was like, is it CIA, FBI? Turns out it's a political thriller. I thought it was just gonna be this like two-hander directed by Kathryn Bigelow.
I had not seen the
Carl Sagan voiceover trailer that was making the rounds. Have you seen that still? No. So it's this famous Carl Sagan pale blue dot? I've read that book, yeah. Yeah, but it sounds like Sagan is on a phone. There is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. I think they're trying to play up the angle of like what would Carl Sagan say if he's like talking to the human race? It's like President Idris Elba called him and was like, What should I do, Carl? Yeah. Carl, what do I do? And yeah, I hadn't even seen that trailer, but I warned you that I was gonna have a really hard time taking this movie seriously.
Quite simply because, again, to your point about the Trump administration, especially the second version of Trump, I thought there's no way I can take seriously a representation of the US government in the end of 2025. And there's it also feels like to me, and we're gonna get into this, there's no way that Kathryn Bigelow, when she was producing this movie, was expecting the outcome of the election that happened in 2024, even though it was made. A couple weeks before the election. Yeah. They started principal photography for this movie in October of 2024. I don't I think we're going to be saying a lot of less than positive things about this movie. I like to wrap my criticism in a compliment sandwich.
I do think, and this is starting with, I don't remember point break well enough to and I don't think it's this kind of movie, but this this sort of Obama era phase of her career. I think she did some really effective stuff, even with Zero Dark Thirty, which I don't think is a great film. Mm-hmm. Showing whether it's like a single person or a team, Anthony Mackey and Jeremy Redder. Jerry Redder.
Jerry Redder like diffusing this bomb, like a very technical process-based thing, where it's like you get one thing wrong, you blow up, and you blow up some of your friends, or you know, the hunt for bin Laden, which is an entire bureaucracy doing a bunch of painstaking things, taking those like really intricate processes at both minuscule and massive scale, and injecting some like human pathos. And like it's like Terrifying watching Jeremy Renner and you know try to do this stuff. And similarly, I felt like the parts of it that were compelling, the parts of Zero Dark Thirty that were compelling were about the sort of process, the march to get Bin Laden, the reason they do the things the way they do.
That's very much what she's trying to do in this film as well. And the extent and and then providing critiques on process that are supposed to be terrifying. if you still think nuclear war is our biggest threat. I'm gonna see if I can kind of thread a needle between the
filmmaking technique that you're describing from Bigelow in specifically The Hurt Locker, but also in Zero Dark Thirty, which I haven't seen the Zero Dark Thirty since it came out, but I rewatched The Hurt Locker this week. And it's crazy to me that you the your descriptions of it make it feel like you have watched it recently because if you're remembering the stuff, the kind of DNA of that movie that is the most compelling. I think that stuff really stuck with me. I was like Jeremy Renner riding Anthony Mackey like a bull or whatever, like no recollection of that at all. But the like the emotional toll of diffusing bombs and all the handsy stuff and the pathos that you're describing.
Renner just clearly being a deeply traumatized individual from this process. Like that's what I remember of the movie. And that's what I thought made it great. You know, like I guess like just to wrap a bow on that, it's like I don't feel like I she is a she is a director with some pretty tremendous talents. Like a hundred percent. Point breaks, a great movie. You know, I was a young teenager when Bigelow made the movie Blue Steel with Jimmy Lee Curtis and Ron Silver. Really great. Yeah. Cop thriller action movie. Yeah. And of course, Point Break kind of goes without saying, even though Point Break kind of missed me generationally, I feel like it was a movie made for teenage girls.
And I just I don't that was my perception I was young for it too, but I remember thinking it was really cool. And I like wanted to be those dudes when I saw it when I was like ten or something. So Bigelow then totally belly flopped in the year two thousand with a Sean Penn led thriller adapted from a novel of the same name. It's called The Weight of Water. I'm pretty sure you would have been here no what what was it even about? Don't even matter. Adaptation of a book that lost a ton of money, critics hated it.
And then I would say that the year 2002 was like an inflection point in Kathryn Bigelow's career because she takes on her first of like a genre that clearly she's got some skill exploring, which is historical, political, military thriller. It was this movie called K19 The Widowmaker with Harrison Ford. Did you see that movie? I remember it. I remember Harrison Ford playing a Russian, which seemed weird to me. I did not see the movie though. It was really good. Harrison Ford was great in it, but he's playing the captain of a Russian nuclear submarine. Yeah. And it was based on a true story. And I think it was very Cold War. Nobody cared. It had already been twelve years since the Berlin Wall fell.
And critics were kind of meh, like, you know, split on it. And it
Lost about forty million dollars at the box office. So this I think is the inflection point that where she took five years off of filmmaking and then in comes the mark bull collaboration era. And I want to use something you had just said to tee this up, which is extraordinarily skilled filmmaker, Kathryn Bigelow, but pretty dependent upon the source material. Yep. It all starts with the great script. Yeah. And a couple of these duds in her career. I think could be attributed to the script, which we'll wrap a bow on when we're done talking about all these movies.
But Luke, we mentioned at the introduction to this podcast what we're trying to do is put on a meter of cultural relevance the movies that we talk about, social, political, cultural relevance, right? Tell me where did a house of dynamite land for you on that continuum before we get into talking about the details of the movie. Well we sort of already hinted at it and rather than just like spoil it for everybody, I was just thinking about when you make a geopolitical movie, regardless of what era that movie takes place, you know, the setting of it, it it's going to be judged against the era we're living in and how well it sort of matches, or maybe doesn't even try to.
Maybe you're just trying to make a historic epic about World War Two or something. You're not trying to tell a story about the present. Whatever. That's fine. Unfortunately for Bigelow, this was not a period piece. No, it's not a period piece. But it really feels like one. If it weren't for the if it weren't for the smartphones, this feels like a movie that should be set in like nineteen eighty one, like I said, like the year I was born. It feels positively anachronistic. Yeah. Like I I said in the the beginning, it's like this would have been something I grew up worrying about or my parents and grandparents would have been talking about.
Look, let's do this. Let's do a kind of, for the most part, spoiler-free plot summary. Yeah. So the movie opens in Fort Greeley, Alaska, which is a place you have some familiarity with because it's near where you grew up. But about a hundred miles south of where I grew up. In Fairbanks, Alaska. Yeah. It's at a radar station or you know, a radar plus it's a surveillance station monitoring global airspace moments before the equipment picks up an intercontinental ballistic missile launch missile launch from dot dot dot bum bum bum somewhere. in kind of East is Asia. Not sure. Not sure if it's the Russians, not sure if it's the Chinese, not sure if it's the North Koreans.
The leader of this little outpost at the time that this happens, like a shift commander, is Major Dow Daniel Gonzalez, played by Anthony Ramos. Some really good emotional moments from him, I thought. Which different points. That's right. Yeah, he just shows up in the Puerto Rican. He's a Puerto Rican actor. Yeah. He commands the operation. The only personal detail we get to know about Gonzalez is that his wife has just left him. And that is like there are moments where we just get a sliver of somebody's life and it's very, very affecting. No. This first sliver we just get in my mind was just like, this poor bastard's about to like have the worst day of his life and his wife just left him.
Like it just feels like they did Anthony Ramos dirty here. They did. so the missile launch has happened, everybody scrambles, everybody's doing their job. Cause these are like frontline intelligence officers, radar techs. These are the people who whose job it is is to just find the information and run it up the chain of command. We cut then to the White House, to the basically the next tier of information gathering and processing. Captain Olivia Walker, played by my queen and maybe yours, Rebecca Ferguson. Love her. Great actress. she's basically like a military intelligence officer running this entire room of like, okay, an event has happened somewhere in the world. What are we doing?
Who are the experts we're bringing in? What's the data sources we're collecting? We just need to sort of parse this information and get it up the chain of command to the deciders. We're gonna jump on a Zoom call, like the world's most secure Zoom call, and talk about what happens. But that's her job and her team's job is to figure out where did it come from, where's it gonna hit, and what is like the threat assessment.
I love that you said the deciders because I just immediately flashed on the ultimate decider, George W. Bush. Right. But I'm the decider and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the Secretary of Defense. They eventually figure out that the target of this attack is that most American city, Chicago. So this is not a story that's intended to be about our conflict with any individual person. It's how our nation responds to a particular threat, regardless of who's sending it, I think. 'Cause it would be much more complicated movie to make if they it was like China or Russia or North Korea.
And a fairly important characteristic of this movie that I think they do a very good job and Bigelow does a great job of capturing is the these jobs of all these people should be just pretty ordinary and boring and kind of dull. You're basically watching you're watching a pot that you hope never boils right every single day for and it's and they they all get caught flat footed by the events of the movie, which I think was Portrayed really, really effectively. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. They portray Ferguson as this Captain Walker being part of a family that's fairly connected. Magnanimous in its its structure. Yep. The husband has fairly equal duties. He's staying up late with a sick kid who has COVID. He's handsome.
He looks like he might be like a congressman or something. He's got the flag pin on at all times. He's got like the streak of gray hair, even like her job is the national security of our country. Yeah. We're gonna talk a number of times about like the liberal portrait of America and and civil servants and stuff. I think those are the hints you're getting that like more than anything else, like you kind of mentioned with like this should be simple process done by people who are experts.
Bigelow is a really big believer in like sort of technocratic liberalism as a as like not just what we do in America, but maybe like the highest point of for these kinds of foreign policy decisions, maybe the ultimate form of liberalism. The best we could possibly do is tech is We could possibly do is technocracy. I'm just trying to hold back a cough. Sorry, dude. It's all good. Now it's gonna look like it was fucking cracked. I'm just don't so beautiful. I love technocracy so much. You should leave this in. Let's cut this in. Well, I was just gonna say before I choked on my water that Bigelow has this, it's almost pious in its portrait of American life and the government and like faith.
Technocratic faith in all these institutions is just like it's it's so wild. And I feel almost bad for her that this movie got made and now we're living through the complete fucking circus of this Trump two point And not only I think it's piousness, I think it's exactly right, but it's a particular kind of piousness. It's like the piousness of an orthodoxy. It's like Catholic piousness. It is like we have our Pope, we have our cardinals, we have an entire structure that's designed to protect us. From going to hell or from nuclear war. It's not like the very American, like evangelical, like distributed everybody has a personal relationship with God.
The piousness is to the structure and to the or basically the order of the universe, really. And and back to this idea of it being somewhat anachronistic and belonging to a different era. There were so many moments where I was like, this is like straight out of West Wing. Yeah. yeah. It was very Sorkin-y. I've got so I'm glad you brought that up because I was gonna step on your West Ring reference later. But we'll we'll get to West Wing in a second and Tork in a All right. So we go back to Fort Greeley, and basically there is a nuclear deterrence at Fort Greeley where they're basically going to shoot two missiles for redundancy and they're going to knock this nuke out of the sky.
They s they call it hitting a bullet with a bullet. Yeah. Which is, I think, from what I understand it, these are ballistic missiles. These are missiles traveling at the speed of ballistics, like the speed of missiles or the speed of bullets. And it's a very difficult physics problem. To do this, but we've done it. We've built it because we're America. We're the greatest nation in the history of the world and we have the greatest and smartest people. And we have very diligent people working these controls. One of the missiles explodes after takeoff. So it's completely off the board. And then the everybody in an in all of these CENTCCOM situations is left to watch the final missile sort of overlap trajectories.
Wait, wait, wait, pause, pause, pause. Yeah. It missed. Which and at that point that means that this I C BM has entered suborbit, which means it is on its way to its final destination and nothing's gonna stop it. In the world of the movie, that that's basically the only shot they get. And so with the rest of this time, they have to think about
Evacuation or what do we do? And then do we retaliate? We we all have only met Jared Harris's second secretary of defense character through the Zoom screen. So he's like a postage stamp on the movie theater screen. The deputy national security advisor played by Gabriel Basso, who we're gonna talk about in a second. You had a note on him. He basically is trying to hem and haw to get the words out of like this the how bad the odds were after the fact. Finally, somebody's just like, just say it, man. And he's like, We there was a 61% chance of success. And that's when Jared Harris With a tone of incredulity, says it was a goddamn coin flip. Yeah.
And his incredulity becomes my incredulity because I'm like, how is a character how would they not know that? But then also how could that be our response? But I also feel like I'm being contrarian and possibly hypocritical in my criticism of the movie because I'm talking about how incompetent the current administration is. I have no Issue imagining that Pete Hegseth wouldn't know the percentages of these GBIs to stop a nuke. So I think here's my here's my take on this.
I actually don't think a Secretary of Defense would spend any time at all thinking about great state war with like a nuclear salvo between the Russians and the Americans because they're worried about terrorists, they're worried about dirty bombs, they're worried about other things, they're worried about internal like distress. I hear you. It's just such a juicy fat statistic of a key performance indicator or whatever you want to call it in military strategic circles, right? It feels hard to imagine something of such critical importance to just maybe he doesn't know 61%, but he sure as hell knows it's a coin flip. That it's a coin flip or close to it. Like it feels like a weird revelation. Anyways. Okay.
So at that point, the miss the the only deterrent has missed. So the calculus shifts. Chicago is going to be a pile of rubble unless the nuke is a dud, which is a possibility to discuss. How many more cities might follow is a question for reasons of math? It's impossible to know in the next 10 minutes where the launch came from. So they have to, they basically have to decide on a nuclear strike against the entire entirety of Asia. Walker's team starts fielding calls from foreign leaders. They start trying to orchestrate calls with other nuclear powers.
There's a Warhawk general who's trying to justify the biggest possible response. There's Gabriel Basso's character. Yeah, yep. He's a a mild proxy for Dr. Strangelove. Kind of. Yeah, yeah. Caught somewhere between the George Seascott character and Jack Ripper. If on the other hand. We were to immediately launch an all out and coordinated attack on all their airfields and missile bases, we'd stand a damn good chance of catching them with their pants down. Yeah, he's not a psychopath, but he is the guy who's like, We need to do the most possible. Yeah. then there's Gabriel Basso who's saying, Maybe we don't do anything at all because we don't really know where this is coming from, guys. Like Chicago's gone.
We're not gonna get Chicago back. Can we maybe stop like the whole rest of the world getting nuked? Is his perspective. As the missile gets closer and closer to desecrating the grave of Mike Ditka and murdering 10 million people along with it, each leader and team is kind of left to cope with the events that just transpired and the new world that may be born in the aftermath. The screen fades to black. That is the whole plot of a House of Dynamite, but that is not the whole film because basically the structure of this film, which I think is interesting, is we rewind back to the beginning and then we see the same 20 minutes play out. with like the next layer of decision maker up.
So sort of like the middle management. That's where we stop seeing Gabriel Basso in a little postage stamp. And we see him like literally running down the mall, like jumping out of a car because there's a traffic jam trying to get into the the situation room, basically. The Tracy Let's general character getting ready to walk into StratCom. Yep. Into the basically the big board, the the war room, whatever you want to call it, out of war games or Doctor of Strangelove. Yep. To be in that room, which is clearly it's not quite like cobwebs and dust, but it's not a room that's entered very often.
It's and and juxtaposed with the the room that with the Walker character is in, where there's like a million screens everywhere in real time data, there's now a a big conference room in the middle that, like you're saying, feels very Cold War era. And this is where also we sort of get the first person view of National Security Advisor Barrington, the
Bossel character. As Act Two plays out, we get deeper context into the lives and opinions of these people. But this is the important thing that for me that I want to start teeing up now and we'll talk about later. You don't get any new information about the crisis. No. From here on out. No. You do not learn anything new. You've heard it all. And actually, it's sort of a form of dramatic irony, which the dramatic irony is this idea where the audience knows something that the characters don't. Because we've watched the first third of the film, we actually know things that these characters don't.
And then once we actually get to the president and the Secretary Defense in Act Three, we know a lot of stuff that they don't know. Yeah. So that's the the mid the mid-level sort of bureaucrats and and generals and stuff are Act Two. Yeah. Act three, we get our final set of characters. And it's a big reveal. Well, but the and the Vig the big reveal actually takes a while. And this is this does this is the interesting thing to me. When we were talking about is this is this an Obama type character? Is it a Trump type character? We don't, we've not seen Idris Elba yet. That's another moment I leaned over to you and went, if it's Idris Elba. is the president, I'm leaving the movie theater.
Yeah, which you did not make good on that threat, and you were right. but it also it starts the act three starts at a Civil War reenactment. Yeah. with an NSA advisor to the who's an expert in North Korea. Greta play played by Greta Lee. Yeah. Really, really great actress. I like her a lot. Mm-hmm. before you see her character there, I'm like, is this is the president just like celebrating Gettysburg or something, right? That was your that was your prediction. Yeah. Yeah. And I kinda thought that was like the attention. And then it cuts to the Serengeti. Yeah. Yeah. But we don't know that at first either. So I'm like, is this like, you know, Trump out on Safari or something?
Wait, is that character revealed before Alba? Yeah. I think you've got so yeah. and then we finally realized that no, Idris Elba is a responsible president, but he is an imperial president and like the PR president, which we've you know, and he's at like basically like a a WNBA event with Angel Reese and a bunch of like orphan children or something shooting hoops when the call comes in. So we have the apex of the American command structure
None of them are like where you would ideally want them to be when a bomb gets fired or a nuke gets fired. And despite that, these very serious people have to make very serious decisions with a with an extremely occluded sense of information, like like the full girth of the intelligence gathering apparatus in act one between Fort Greeley and Walker's station in the White House. We get like a pinprick of that with the our Secretary of Defense and our president.
From here out, this is where the spoilers are gonna come in. But now let's get into talking about the moments. Yeah. The structure of this podcast is Luke and I watched this movie at our local movie theater called The Magic Lantern. And the people that come to watch the movie, they're invited. We let people know that it's a it's a public screening, but you're welcome to chat with us after the movie. We did have half a dozen people that were specifically there for that purpose. Let's start the moments by talking about this structure. Please, yeah. Okay. So it immediately recalls, I mean, the most famous example of the structure is Kurosawa's Roshiman.
The the pleasure and It's also a pretty common device in like fiction in like storytelling, yeah, like novels and stuff. Totally. What makes this movie so bizarre is that as Luke pointed out, you the audience already knows. chapter and verse, everything that happens in the story, and they just see it repeated. You've already almost heard kind of like think of it as like a radio drama. Yeah. You've already heard the entirety of the story in this radio drama. The only thing that's changing is where does the camera go? Where does the point of view of that camera go to reset those stories? Yeah. And that part is interesting.
Each of these resets, I just kind of felt like already, before we even get to talking about the ending. A slight sad trombone of like, God, I don't want to see this a third time. It wasn't that interesting the first and second time. For the purposes of like this is a nuclear deterrence documentary, right? Or it's a it's a documentary to be like in a time when you need the best information you possibly can to make a decision, you're not gonna have it. That's the whole point of this structure.
And I do think that's a very effective way to sort of tell the story that like the person who decides, in this case, Idris Elba. has the least information throughout and he doesn't get any closer to having enough information to make the decision well. And that's it's an interesting it's effective. It's an interesting defense of also if we think about this pious faith that Bigelow has in American institutions, right? She wants to shove in our faces as the audience and as Americans in particular, how
This is dangerous. This is this should be of critical concern to every American. Ignore all the other things that you think are wrong with American life and and the world writ large and pay attention to this. And I'm gonna show you from all these different perspectives of how this whole situation is super fucked up. She's saying this is a process failure in a world where we have very serious people making very serious decisions and What undercuts the whole relevance of the film in my mind is that we do not currently and have not for some time had very serious people making decisions. I was just gonna say I did find this movie very funny.
And at one point in the theater, I have to shout out one of the audience members whose feedback we will hear in the responses, who laughs out loud at a s a section of the movie that's not supposed to be played for laughs. Right. You have these Zoom calls where the top left corner of the screen is blacked out. And it's supposed to be the president of the United States. And I was thinking to myself, I feel bad for Ice Cube, who's getting shit all over for his War of the Worlds remake. For his War of the Worlds remake. because it was evolved on Zoom. But I'm like, a lot of this movie's on Zoom in a way Zoom is a character in this movie. Zoom's a character and Zoom is funny.
It's almost like we were talking all the time about how cell phones just suck. Well, Zoom calls are inherently shitty too, and also kind of funny. It takes away from the gravity of the purpose behind the storytelling. Yep. the other thing I just kept thinking is the back to this West Wing idea. It sometimes, technically speaking, there's a little bit of walk and talk with some steady cams, but sure I was like, this movie would be so much better if Timothy Simons and his characters, Jonah Ryan. Yeah. If Joan O'Ryan walks around the corner eating a donut while like, you know checking to see why his posts about this nuclear event aren't getting more likes on Twitter.
And like the the the after the credits roll at the very end, you just see him still holding that donut and the entire Capitol is like evacuated in a in a bob shelter. He's Where did everybody go? Where did everybody go? And also once again, checking his mentions. How come how come more people aren't liking my posts? It's not meant to be a funny movie. I will say though, as far as selling the drama of the movie.
The music is a constant reminder that this is a very serious movie. And I did love the score. I didn't know the name of this guy. Yeah. His name is Volker Bertelmann. And it's just all these like Jaws-like simple rakes across stringed instruments and lots of low woodwinds. I mean, the the music in this is awesome. It does a great job of selling that this is a serious movie. Right. Luke, what is a serious movie need, though? It's a serious movie. Needs a serious director. It also, as we've mentioned, needs a very serious writer. And the writer of this, Noah Oppenheim, has the pedigree of a very serious writer. He I think he self describes as a journalist. He ran NBC News, which is not always a journalistic role.
It's sometimes it's a business role, but he sort of purports himself to be a journalist. He's written a number of screenplays. One which I think was pretty well received was about Jackie Kennedy. and then he has written at least two pieces of speculative fiction that I've seen, this film, and a truly limited yeah. Sorry, truly limited in many senses, a truly awful limited Netflix series called Zero Day, which I don't even want to get into it because I do not I watched the movie I watched it like three months ago. I already don't remember very important parts of the plot, and I did not want to give myself the brain worms that it would take to go back and remember it. But the the high level is that.
It is again about process breakdowns or or vulnerabilities in our national defense. In this case, it's about a hack that takes place that takes out basically all American critical infrastructure for a set period of time. And the possibly senile ex-president Robert De Niro brought in to clean up the mess. This is all just to say that Oppenheim is, like Bigelow, very, very concerned about who is running our country and the processes and institutions that sort of keep us all safe. how we and how easy it is for our national systems how easy our national systems might be corrupted by dumb or evil people either inside or outside our government. All right, should we get to the audience stuff?
Yeah, let's get to our audience. the first one we're gonna play is speaks to basically our audience's feedback about the competence or the lack of competence in our current government and watching this movie through that lens. That was very real life, I thought, and very scary.
Because you can see how human frailty could could destroy the whole world. Sure. Some of the narcissistic decisions that could be made from that position and the power that he has. And I'm afraid of how he might use that. So that's probably the most terrifying part of the movie for me. Not only do we have unqualified people in positions, but we have less people where they should be. They were in the movie was portrayed very well. Even though they were really human, they still did their job, at least a little bit, like most of it. The the first thing that I wrote down about this specifically was casting Jared Harris as a very kind of what's the word I'm looking for?
Kind of died in the wool, Secretary of Defense, very like Rumsfeld esque. And meanwhile, we have Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who, as this movie was getting ready to be released, invited all the generals from around the world to like come to Washington, DC for this meeting where he could just basically say that woke is dead, shave your beards, get in shape, you fat asses. Yeah. And Valhalla, motherfucker. Like it's it is just the first instance of where when I saw the casting of Jared Harris, I was just like, I'm having a hard time with this. I was having a hard time when I saw the Walker character played by Rebecca Ferguson. And it makes a mention early in the movie of like the White House is on the line.
And I just started to laugh. So it's like, I'm just like, you know who that is? It's not Obama two point it's Trump two point who's on that phone. Right. This is a film about people, serious people who trust institutions, processes, stuff too much. Yeah. Even back then, right? It's not it's not Kathryn Bigelow's fault that Trump won the second time, but Oppenheim, as he was writing this film, sh could have and should have reflected on the first Trump presidency, which was one where they were actively undermining institutions. The second time around, they were being a lot more successful. They're literally destroying institutions. So every the everybody's fears were absolutely well founded.
But also, to just reiterate, I don't think in that context, our biggest threat of annihilation as a country is a nuclear, as a nuclear ICBM strike. That's not even the top 20 threats for me.
Well, and most of the tension in the United States right now is within the country. I think it was the day after we watched this movie, speaking of Pete Hegseth. It's announced that the United States and Qatar had signed a deal to open a Qatari Air Force facility in the US at Mountain Home Air Force. Outside of Boise. Yeah. Is it Boise? Yeah. my god. The next section of audience feedback we're gonna about is kind of speaks to the the frailty of the human beings that are making the decisions that could cost lives because of personal attachments, which we think I think we both agree this movie did a good job of of portraying.
I appreciated the way the the different storylines were interwoven with one another and showing the human factors of each person caring for people. that also cost time, precious time with so little time on the clock. I I wish AI w was further along to make some of these decisions. So we don't have people like being dumb making emotional decisions based on their own self-interests. Given the alternative, maybe I would want AI making decisions about at least intercepting nukes, not necessarily shooting them off at people, but I would have much rather maybe a computer program made some decisions about how many missiles to send up after that nuke that's aimed at Chicago.
I think the moment in this movie that hit the hardest to me emotionally, maybe it's because I have kids, I don't know, but it was the Rebecca Ferguson character calling her husband and saying, You need to get in the car to just drive west. And she can barely even get the sentence out because she's counting to the point that's made in this this note from our audience that They don't have time to have human lives, but they're still human beings. She's wearing a jacket and she pulls from the pocket of the jacket a a little toy dinosaur from her kid. And her kid had given that to her earlier in the sh movie. Yeah.
And she's got her back turned to her colleague and she's starting to have this convulsive you know, breakdown emotionally and crying, and she's just like stopping herself, like through total determination. The Jared Harris character,
Calls his daughter who lives in Chicago. And this is very spoiler, so stop listening to the podcast now, but let's just talk about it. He has a final moment in the movie where it becomes clear that they they couldn't stop the second attempt from the GBI to stop the nuke. Yep. That it's gonna hit Chicago. He calls his daughter, who's in Chicago. It's clear that he and his daughter have a restrained relationship and they might not even be on speaking terms. Mm-hmm. And he's calling, I think initially to be like, get out of Chicago. Yeah. But because their relationship is so broken, she just starts like, I can't do this right now, Dad. Like you can't just call me whenever you want.
Like we I set up boundaries, whatever. And he and this is where I like I just love Jared Harris. It's hard to not love him. And and he can like paper over flaws in in scripts. Yeah. I think what I got was that he just makes a decision in that moment. And it also leads to what happens later with his character, which I don't think we want to spoil. He's like, my God, I actually can't save my daughter. Yeah. Cause she's there's no way I'm gonna be able to have this conversation with her fast enough that she's gonna believe me. Like whatever else is broken about our relationship, yeah. I'm gonna say I'm like I love you.
And then that might be the last So, you know, for what they were, I thought these things were like they were a little bit formulaic. The performances were really affecting. I thought it was competently written. I don't know why I felt the need to bring up this moment from the movie, but it bugged me. It was this very West Wing feeling moment where the Rebecca Ferguson character is standing in line. So this is before there's any crisis. This is just establishing the film. Just yeah, she's just going to work. Yeah. And in a Again, back to the process stuff. It's really cool.
You get to you do get to see some of the inner workings of all the minutia things that these people that work in these highly secure classified circumstances have to go through. They to put their cell phones in these little hermetically sealed boxes with crazy locking mechanisms and all this stuff. And she's in line to get a a breakfast and there's somebody who's on her first day on the job and it's a classic moment where the Rebecca Ferguson character is like.
You want to get the such and such breakfast because it's it's always served fresh or something. It doesn't hold up the line, is what she said. it doesn't hold up the line. And it's just it it's just felt like such a rote. This is just way too much of a trope. Well, and this is like what expertise looks like. Yeah. You whip or snap whatever. So I was not gonna bring this up in a vacuum, but that was the first thing I was like, my god, I know what this is. This is a s it's definitely a Sorkin moment, but it's this is the screenwriter proving to you in the way that Sorkin does in other ways. That he is a serious newsdork. And no, no shade on newsdorks. I'm a newsdork myself.
I really like being like, you know how that sausage gets made? You do X, Y, and Z. He wants you to know that even though he was the president of NBC and may or may not have quashed, single-handedly quashed Ronan Farrow's investigation of Harvey Weinstein. So Ronan had to go to the New Yorker to actually get it published. He's a serious newsman and you want to know how serious he is. He knows how exactly that. What you should order and what you shouldn't order at the White House commissary when there's a line of hardworking civil servants behind you, just trying to get a little fuel for the hard work of keeping us safe. you think he's doing like a I know this? I know this. I know this detail.
This is a detail that nobody else knows because they're not serious people. I'm a serious person. Yeah, there's another character, this this national security advisor character. his name in the movie is Jake Barrington, played by Gabriel Basso. I did bump on that character a lot. It just r something about it really bugged me very straight out of West Wing. Our friend Chris mentioned the AI thing. And I just want to say that I totally agreed with it. Like we have all these models for like think of professional sports. yeah. Every NFL coach, NBA coaches know what to do. Especially baseball. Especially baseball. NBA coaches know what to do. in every ATO automatic timeout, they know what to do.
Coming out of that TV break, what are we gonna what play are we gonna run? What's the most high percentage thing to do? Whether or not to foul when you're down by three with you know twenty seconds left on the clock, all these kinds of things. When to go for it on fourth down. So the idea that we would have this jackass running around with a leather
bound folder filled with all the different scenarios and stuff. Just I really had a st struggle with it. He's the guy who tells us we had a sixty one percent chance of success. So maybe like he's not the guy you would want running point or it's it's true. It is I in that way I think it's meant to represent that like we shouldn't have a person in this role with way too much pressure on them. To perform this certain function that's kind of antiquated. And I think that's a perfect segue. The fact that he's running around with this leather leatherbound book that's got all these scenarios and stuff drawn out on it, it's a perfect segue into the next comment we have from our audience.
I meant so that book Annie Jacobson read, she started it in twenty fifteen when she found out Trump was gonna be president and that one of the things she heard in conversation was like, You want this dude in charge of the nuclear codes? They showed a picture of Eisenhower in the movie, right? She says in the book that a lot of the protocols haven't been updated from nineteen sixty. So that's why we're still using paper, we're still using all this stuff. And so you you can't you have to have the pieces of paper, you have to have the two keys. You can't you can't run the world off. You can't run that stuff off in an iPad.
So when we were watching this movie and this comment was made, it made me rem it made me think about my brother in law f flew helicopters for the Coast Guard for many years. And when I visited the hangar where he was in Traverse City in Michigan once upon a time, he showed me the computer that was inside of this thing. And it was I think literally built in the nineteen seventies. Probably, yeah. But it I mean, you could almost hear the ones and zeros being punched inside of it. It was just so old and enormous and like kind of over engineered. Part of the reason that they still use that equipment is because they A know it works. Yep. Right. And also it's not online.
It has no network connectivity connected to it. So I but I didn't it's not gonna play you you can't get all Apple CarPlay on that thing, but it'll tell you exactly what the altitude is. Yes, and it can't get hacked. And I think that this description
Of the movie shows the sort of impossibility of the project that nuclear weapons and protocols and processes are inherently funny and just a part of like humanity combining with our frailty that, you know, we make mistakes with the unfathomable, which is that we invented something that can destroy the planet in seconds. So there's a few moments when in the movie where they can't merge calls with the Russian foreign minister. And if you've seen Dr. Strangelove, you're it does it feels like. A nod.
Doesn't it feel like a little bit of an homage that they can't merge a phone call with a Russian foreign minister who they desperately need to get in touch with? which deprives us of a kind of a Doctor Strangel moment where you would have been able to see the equivalent of this movie of like Merkin Muffly, the president talking to the Soviet premier Dmitry Kissov. Let me finish, Dmitry. Of course it's a friendly call. It it doesn't it did feel like There was a Peter Sellers moment that we could have had in this movie, but we were deprived of it because they couldn't they couldn't merge calls. the only other thing I just want to point out, this is this is where they had the acronyms all over the place. Right.
So we had GBI, we had WHSR, we have which is White House White House Situation Room, we have SBX, which means C based X-Band Radar, StratCom, POC, which I had never seen that one before, Presidential Emergency Operations Center. And they do this really clever thing with the animation where the acronyms would kind of stretch out. And then the whole word. And then you'd get the whole words behind them and re reveal their meaning, which I thought was cool, but it was also kind of felt like a keynote from a tech conference sort of a vibe. The the design did, yeah. But I do think that's like a good way.
When you're getting this like insidery thing, you don't want to like break the fourth wall of like having the character be like GBI. And as we all know, that means ground based ballistic interceptor, right, guys? Like around the room of people who like probably s o have never even said the full word. They just say GBI, GBI, GBI. 'Cause that's the way institutional jargon works. It's a very good technical solve for that. So this is where we start seeing like having Cold War tech becomes a real problem when the president is a celebrity and not like sitting there in the situation room right next to you.
Like I couldn't help but thinking that like what a cold war mindset all of these characters were still acting under, which is a bummer. And I think a a
myop a myopia of the film. And the deterrence missiles in that context are only set to shoot like two at a time, not because that's like what's statistically most likely to shoot down that one nuke, but it's because our establishment still expects another five thousand nukes from The Soviet Union, which doesn't even exist anymore, to follow on. And we need to preserve that to maybe if we don't, if we can't save Chicago, we should at least try to save Detroit or Spokane or Seattle or whatever. If it is true, it's it's not just the systems that need to be updated, it's our geopolitical thinking that needs to be updated.
If this truly is still the the decision-making process people are going through, then we're really cooked, actually, I think. And so, like rather than like somebody having like real actionable insights about okay, we don't know who this is. It could easily be a rogue actor. If it were a rogue actor, what should we do? Maybe we shouldn't just randomly retaliate against all of East Asia because maybe that's what that person wanted us to do in the first place. They they wanted to start a nuclear war because they're a Korean separatist group that wants us to nuke Kum Kim Jong-un so they can run Korea. I don't know. Like there are a thousand scenarios that I'm a hundred percent sure are not in that binder.
And instead of that, all we're left with is Gabriel Basso's character just being like, please don't nuke anybody, guys. Please don't do it. Just please. Tru true. And he gets, I think, the most compelling sort of a human line in the movie, I think, which is we either surrender or we commit suicide. Is that what it is? Something like that. Suicide by nuclear weapon. All right, let's get to Our last piece of feedback about the movie, which is our friend Chris just basically saying, like, how did this movie work or not work with him when it was over? I liked the real time of act one and two, the brevity in the timeline. I thought three when it got to there, I got bored at the beginning.
Idris Elba definitely carried that to rekindled my interest, but I didn't like how they extended the timeline. I felt like that one dragged on a little bit.
from the different timelines did drag on over time, especially since we knew what was gonna happen. Or didn't know what was gonna happen at the end, I guess. But whatever. It was a lot of a lot of foreplay and a and not a very good finish. Yeah. I I I was really expecting with all that build up a little more satisfaction at the end. The best part of this is he actually said I had and I d I don't know why we didn't include this. He said it was a a blue balls moment. Yeah. All right. So yeah, here comes the in intensely thick spoiler. So stop here if you want to watch a house of dy if we have not sold you yet on watching a house of dynamite. it ends with an establishing shot of Raven Rock Mountain Complex.
I had never heard of this, a self-sustaining nuke bunker in Pennsylvania somewhere. As a bus that's carrying all the evacuees, the most important people is making its way winding down this road through the gate into this complex, our audience like audibly groaned. Everybody in the room was like, What? So right credits roll. That's the end of the movie. We don't know what happens to the nuclear missile. We see Idris Elba, he's in a plane trying to decide what to do. Yes, that's right. And no decision is made. Yeah. So we don't know He well, he calls his wife in the Serengeti. In the Serengeti, who picks up the phone and he's like getting ready to tell her, hey, nuclear Armageddon's about to start, what do I do?
And their f their phone call breaks up. Right. So he's he's left to make this decision alone, but we don't know what decision he makes. We don't know if Chicago's still around. we don't know any of that stuff. We just know that our most serious people are safely tucked away in Raven Rock Mountain Complex. So on yeah, on the one hand for me, this is a big conversation right now in film going, is having filmmakers or even critics spoon feed audiences the meaning. What did this movie mean? Yeah. Tell me the theme of it. Right. Tell me what it's like. Just okay, great. I've done that. Now it's almost kind of like when you watch a movie based on
Real events, and then you immediately want to watch. And I do this all the time. You want to go to Wikipedia afterward and be like, what did they change? Yeah. What was real? wow. It's the same sort of a mentality. So the problem is that's a modern audience right now. Modern audiences kind of want, they don't as actively engage in this stuff. So this movie, when it ends, is basically presenting the audience with a what should you do, audience? Make sure to vote. Yeah. Vote blue no matter who. You know, it has that sort of a vibe to it of like, you see what we're dealing with here? And instead it just kind of was met with like a very sad trombone kind of a response from our audience.
And I think that that that is cut partially an audience response thing. It's also in a more a a movie where the question it asks is more salient and meaningful, I might have paused on a cliffhanger ending like that more. I think if you were all in on the storytelling and the premise and the atmosphere and everything else, then this ending could have worked for you. I mean, there's been so there's countless examples of movies that end on this sort of suspenseful note where the audience is meant to sort of go dot dot dot, what happens next?
Before we go any further dunking on this movie at all, let's talk about some of the things we liked. And I'm just gonna point out a couple, okay? Do you have a couple ready? I got a couple. So there's a moment where the submarines are activated, the and they're getting ready to launch. And it was very K19 Widowmaker, and I thought this is like super competent filmmaker, and I got like super into it for a moment. Yeah. It's also This was shot by Barry Ackroyd, a legendary English cinematographer. He shot the hell out of this movie.
He also shot the hell out of The Hurt Locker. he's probably best known for his as a longtime cinematographer and partner of Ken Loach, Scottish filmmaker, made one of my favorite movies called My Name is Joe. Shout out Peter Mullan if you haven't seen movie. so those are the the couple things that I did like about the movie. I mentioned that I love the music. Yeah. What about you? What did you like about this? I think I've already covered the things that I liked.
I think again, Bigelow's really great at either showing minute or large scale processes or just process in general, diffusing a bomb, diffusing a nuclear standoff, or maybe not diffusing a nuclear standoff, and the like the emotional and psychological toll that can take on people. I think that's great. I think she's good at coaxing good performances out of good actors. And if I guess if I was wa like I've said now a couple of times, if I was watching this movie in a vacuum and I wasn't thinking about our actual reality, I'm Think I probably would have been satisfied by the presentation of this. I would have been like, wow, this is a tough question. Somebody had to think about.
We jumped ahead to the yikes of it all with this movie. I have an observation about the whole Obama thing. It's the president of the United States being obsessed with basketball. They've have a moment where Idris Elba shoots a jump shot from about 12 feet away. His jumper is totally broken. You've got Michelle Obama on a Safari, which we talked about. I felt like this is kind of Very liberal wish casting. It's like you're using the most charismatic, almost James Bond black man in the world who's English. Probably the only black man who's ever even been considered for James Bond, if we're being honest. Yep.
And then he has a scene with Angel Reese at a WNBA game where a reporter comes up and says, Who has a better three point shot? You or Angel?
And Luke, you reached over to me and you were like, Angel Reese, is she known for her outside shot? And I was like, I very quickly speed Googled that. Nope, career 18%, three point. She's a postplayer. And this is where it's like the credit I just gave Oppenheim for being a serious news guy is proof that nobody on this cast is a serious sports person. The other thing about this sort of depiction of Obama 2.0 from Idris Elba to me was I feel like right now in the United States, we are more likely To elect a reincarnated AI version of Charlie Kirk than another black man. Yeah. That's how cynical I am about the current state of things in the United States. Like a like a Christian nationalist a like a chat agent.
Yeah. AI agent is more likely than Obama two point I totally agree with that. And I, you know, I I think you've made a very good case for the kind of degradation of information as it travels up the ladder in the US government and how That's one of the things that as pious as Bigelow is in general, toward a faith in our institutions and this kind of technoc technocratic perspective. More than once, I do have to to say that the Idris Elba performance reminded me of him in Hot Ones, that famous meme where he's like choking on the wing. Yeah. But I he had a couple of moments like that where like there's something that catches him by surprise, a piece of information. I just, I don't know.
I I it was it was a little bit silly.
When I rewatched The Hurt Locker, having just watched both A House of Dynamite and Detroit, I was like, the opening ten minutes of Hurt Locker have more depth and character, more effective storytelling, more visual storytelling than anything in either Detroit or a House of Dynamite. I clearly there are things I remember about Hurt Locker twenty years after watching it or whatever, fifteen years after watching it. I I'm already No, I no, I'm not gonna remember what happened in this film like next week. Okay. Let's let's wrap a bow on just kind of the overall takeaways about Kathryn Bigelow, because I feel like it's worth spending some time thinking about that. Yeah.
So you and I talked about her early movies, Blue Steel, Point Break, Strange Days, okay? Then there's Bigelow at her Obama era best where she makes Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. I think this is where I have landed on that particular era of her filmmaking. True. It's like to me, The Hurt Locker, because I just watched it, it ends with this sort of heavy metal anthrum and a slow mo of the Jeremy Renner character returning to Baghdad or somewhere in Iraq.
And it's like to me, that movie wanted to have its cake and eat it too when it comes to we don't know what to do with all these young men that come back from these wars that the the never ending wars of the US that the US government starts with other countries that have severe PTSD. So fuck it. Let's just have some fun. Send them back. That's kind of how The Hurt Locker ends. And I remember bumping on that when it came out in two thousand eight, that that was the only answer that that movie had to. our participation in never-ending war. Zero Dark Thirty to me is basically the triumph of the will of Blackhawk Downs.
It's like it, and you know, and I think that that movie and Hurt Locker are caught somewhere between a setup of like a powerful critique of our geopolitical interventions all over the planet, in particular the Iraq War, but it has both the aesthetics as well as some of the ideas, I think. Of like a two-hour US armed forces ad that you see before you go watch movies. It's like America's army, yeah. Yeah. And the last note I would want to say, and I want to hear your take on this era, the the The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty era, which is that Zero Dark Thirty had a huge role to play in either the approval, but minimally the acceptance of like the American people and the use of torture.
To extract in intel and information from people. I totally forgot. Yeah, there's there's a lot of a lot of torture. I mean Twenty Four Twenty Four had been a TV show that did all the damage that was needed when it comes to our acceptance of torture. It was messy, but we got To me, both movies super guilty of aestheticizing the politics of never ending war through spectacle and pleasure. And they are both very, very well made pieces of entertainment. That's my feelings about the Kathryn Bigelow. At the peak of her powers during the Obama era with Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. Yeah. The I do think you're right.
Like the way I summed it up in like my elevator pitch was like Hurt Locker is like war is bad, but soldiers are noble or they're good or they're doing a tough job. Zero Dark Thirty was like, this war is bad. We're doing bad things to like prosecute it. But at the end, the good thing is, you know, Osama's gone. I you know, when you think about the fact that Bigelow took
How many it was it wasn't that long. It was a few years between Zero Dark Thirty and Detroit, a movie I just didn't know happened. Okay. So Detroit happens in the year 2017. All right. It was filmed in 2016. And when you think about what the contributions to American culture and to filmmaking from Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker from Bigelow and what it did for the Obama administration, she has become kind of a Trump-era filmmaker too, through both Detroit and And now a house of dynamite. The movie Detroit is filmed in the year 2016 before the election. Yep. It's the third and the final chapter of her collaborations with Mark Boal. It's a historical drama. It's set in Detroit in the year 1967.
It starts with this kind of animation that gives you the history of white flight in the 1960s, followed by racist white cops who are aggressively policing poor black neighborhoods. And it stars, would you believe it? Will Poulter as a racist Detroit cop. It's so funny 'cause like I know him from the Bear where he plays like the one of the sensitive chefs, but then in mid summer he plays a complete dickhead. It was a real clanging moment for me that he was just such a sleazy douche in midsummer because he kind of plays the sensitive chef. I because we Because we know Ari Aster watches every movie, period. There's no way he didn't see Detroit. See Detroit and then be like, Will Poulter's the guy for this.
I'm gonna torture the fuck out of this guy. I'm gonna make this guy eat some pubes. Yeah. So the first act is a lot of table setting for the Detroit uprising of nineteen sixty-seven. This is a historically nonfictional account of what happens. There's violence, there's rioting. Mitt Romney's dad, George, orders the Army National Guard to occupy Detroit and suppress the rioting. The second act that's the first act of the movie. The second act of the movie, which is over an hour, is a brutal and sadistic portrait of this coordinated crackdown by the Army National Guard working with the super racist Detroit police.
At this point in the movie, Will Polterge's already shot in the back a looter who is just trying to steal some groceries. What makes this kind of sadistic is that
S many of the events of the Detroit riots, or it's got all these different names, Detroit Uprising is are unknown. So this is just Mark Boal just kind of coming up with some ideas. So he's already imagined that this poltergeist, the Polter character is meant to be this composite of actual people, but it's a fictional character. And the second act of this movie is him leading these Detroit police. There's a a bunch of young black people, most of them teenagers, that are partying at a motel. What's the motel called? The Algiers. Hmm. It's a three black men, all of them teenagers, end up being murdered by the Detroit police because there's this kid who's pissed off and he shoots a toy gun. It's a starter pistol.
I've heard about this. I know this story actually. And it's it's a true story that this thing happens during this kind of long, torturous, literally torturous scene that's at over an hour of this movie. It ends with a cameo from John Krasinski, the third act, which is really short. He plays a gross union lawyer and And helps get the racist cops off the hook. Jeremy Strong plays the kind of feckless public defender. And some surprise, surprise, the jury finds the racist cops not guilty. And that's more or less the movie. John Boyga plays a kind of a largely thankless role as a security guard who's caught up in the violence at the Alders Motel.
I have so many problems with this movie, but I would say that it's more or less caught somewhere between like concern trolling. When it comes to state and police violence, while also serving up the respectability politics of the 1960s through this boy again character. Yeah. But it doesn't really scrutinize like the failure of that project. It's like a movie that I think it first predicts, but also seems quite nervous about what's gonna happen with the George Floyd protest just a few years later. Interesting. After this movie, Bigelow goes on a long vacation for movies. Her longtime collaborator, the guy we've talked about, Mark Boal.
He goes and makes a twenty nineteen action adventure movie called Triple Frontier with Ben Affleck and Oscar Isaac. Had you heard of this movie? I think I might have like seen the trailer or something. Triple Frontier. Yeah. No. So House of Dynamite was shot in October twenty twenty four. We've talked about this already. It's just about to go into wide release, a year into the second Trump term.
To me, largely the question becomes like, what is Bigelow doing since Zero Dark Thirty? Which was, as you described, I love the term. It's like her victory lap. She's made Detroit, which I think just showed I'm way out over my skis. I'm doing a a piece about something that happened in 1967 during the civil rights movement. And it's me and Mark Bull or got the team back together. So then you go into this movie and you go, All right, well, what does it have to add to the conversation around, you know, Cold War nuclear arms thrillers. And it's like, okay, so in 1964, there were two of those movies made that were there were two books written that were adapted into movies.
Of course, Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, and then Sidney Lumet, legendary filmmaker, made a movie called Fail Safe. And like a very serious filmmaker. The ser yeah, serious serious filmmaker, and the movie itself was serious. So 60 years later, Dr. Strangelove is arguably the greatest satire ever made. And I've never seen Fail Safe. It's a fairly respected movie, but people just didn't find a serious movie about nuclear arms all that all that interesting because it was a I think a critical, okay movie, but it failed at the box office. So the question lurking around a house of dynamite for me is is this movie more or less successful than Sidney Lumet's attempt with Fail Safe?
And I would say, and we've already kind of said this, I don't think people will be talking about. A house of dynamite in six months, let alone in sixty years. Or in six hours. Yeah. So that was an absurd problem, a serious time in the sixties, right? That needed Kubrick to make an absurd like it's so satirical, it's like farcical. It's like I was thinking about that in the context of one this movie and then one battle after another, which is a very serious problem in very unserious times, right? It's talking about creeping fascism, it's talking about there's there's elements of immigration and there's a effectively an ice-like organization called the GRU in it.
Even if Kathryn Bigelow, I think, made a very serious movie about ICE and creeping fascism. Yeah. It would not stick with me the way that one battle after another is going to stick with me. And I've said this on the podcast a couple of times. I don't rewatch movies very often. Yeah. I'm like itching for my third viewing of one after another. I know people who've seen it four times. Yeah. I haven't seen it yet. God dang it. And so like though it is not as like just ta like
intergalactically farcical as Strange Love is, there is Sean Penn's character, Colonel Lockjaw, very much like Jack D. Ripper. He's right out of Strange Love. And he even has a soliloquy that without spoiling it, because the the the dialogue in this movie is like as much the point as the plot is. So I don't want to spoil anything, but he gives a soliloquy that is so similar to Jack D. Ripper's speech about Yeah, Jackie Ripper says, I I have sex with women, but I deny them my essence, basically like we have sex, but I don't ejaculate. Paul Thomas Anderson is directly lifting Strange Love here for the exact effect. And it's so it works so well.
So I feel like what we're saying here, if it's not obvious, is that there are far better movies to watch right now. Yeah. If you want to think about the time that we're living in. And I think between Eddington and one battle after another, 2025 has served up two of the most salient. Yeah. Brilliant and essential, I think, movies. And I haven't even seen one battle in another, but I fully trust everybody that I know that has seen it. Eddington, I've described as the most important movie in the last 25 years. I stick by that point. Yeah. One of the questions we like to ask ourselves is will this movie be added to the physical media collection of all those moments? And the answer to that is no shot.
I won't be watching this movie again. Yeah. Sorry. Anything else, Luke, before we wrap it up? No, I think we've given this film more than it deserved. That's gonna do it for this episode of all those moments. If you liked it, follow us on YouTube, Spotify, Instagram. I'm making lots of posts there. We're in all the usual places. The next episode of the show will be Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind. A heist movie based on a true story. We will be watching that movie on October 24th, and the episode will come out on November 4th. I'm looking forward to a heist movie, man. I like heist movies. I need a kind of a palette cleanser from serious stuff.
And I'm also not that familiar with Josh O’Connor's game, so I'm looking forward to getting into that. I love Kelly Reichardt. We've talked about some of her movies on this podcast before. Until then, thank you all for listening. Thank you, Luke. Thanks, Benji.
done.
In time.