James Cameron has an opinion on the ending of his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, and it may not be what you’d expect.
Spoilers ahead.
The Netflix thriller follows government officials as they try to come up with a response plan as a nuclear missile heads for Chicago—but ends without showing the audience whether or not the missile actually hits. Fans tore the film’s ending to shreds on social media, calling it the “worst ending in the history of bad endings” and complaining the movie lost them “hours” of their lives they’ll “never get back.”
But Cameron, who was married to Bigelow from 1989 to 1991, says fans have it all wrong. Whether or not the missile hits Chicago is “not even really the point,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.
“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.’”
His take may come as a surprise, since the director previously said that Oppenheimer not showing the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “felt like a bit of a moral cop out” in an interview with Deadline.
Bigelow (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty) and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim (Jackie, Zero Day) have also defended A House of Dynamite’s ending. “I want audiences to leave theaters thinking, ‘OK, what do we do now?’” Bigelow told Netflix’s Tudum blog, because “we really are living in a house of dynamite.” Oppenheim had similar thoughts when he argued a “clean and neat resolution” would only “let the audience off the hook.”
Cameron agreed, “From the moment the scenario began at minute zero, when the missile was launched and detected, the outcome already sucked,” he told THR. “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,” he concluded.
“That’s the world we live in, and we need to remember that when we vote next time.”
