James Cameron Defends the Divisive Ending of Netflix's A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE
James Cameron recently weighed in on the ending of Netflix’s A House of Dynamite, a tense political thriller from his longtime friend and former spouse Kathryn Bigelow, and he made it clear he thinks the movie ended exactly where it should have.
It’s an interesting stance from Cameron, especially considering how vocal he’s been in the past about filmmakers pulling punches when it comes to the consequences of nuclear weapons. That contradiction is part of what makes his defense of this movie so interesting.
Bigelow’s latest project was met with mixed reviews, and almost all of the pushback centered on the same thing…. the ending, which I was also not a fan of. When the movie ended, I was like “what the f*ck!?” It just leaves the viewer hanging!
The story of A House of Dynamite kicks off with a nightmare scenario. A single missile is launched toward the United States with no clear indication of who fired it. From there, the film follows military leaders and politicians racing against the clock to identify the attacker and decide how to respond.
The tension escalates, stakes skyrocket, and then the movie stops short of showing the final call. The audience never sees whether the President retaliates. The impact itself isn’t shown either. The whole movie is building up to this intense ending! It takes you to the edge of the cliff, emotions are running high, what is the President going to do!? Then, nothing. It ends.
For Cameron, that choice is the entire point. “I utterly defend that ending,” Cameron told The Hollywood Reporter. “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.”
“The Lady or the Tiger?” by Frank R. Stockton is built around an impossible dilemma. A man must choose between two doors. Behind one is marriage to a woman chosen by the king. Behind the other is a tiger that will kill him. The story ends without revealing which fate he meets, focusing instead on the cruelty of forcing such a choice in the first place.
That same moral trap defines A House of Dynamite. The President faces two outcomes, and both are catastrophic. Retaliation risks igniting a full-scale nuclear war with Russia, which denies launching the missile. Holding back looks like surrender after the destruction of a major American city. Cameron argues that showing the final decision would miss what the movie is actually about.
He said: “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. “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.”
That argument might sound surprising coming from Cameron, who has spent decades confronting the horrors of nuclear annihilation head-on. The Terminator franchise is built on that fear, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day delivered one of cinema’s most haunting images of nuclear devastation with its playground nightmare sequence. His Avatar films also consistently underline the cost of war and unchecked power.
That history is why Cameron’s reaction to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer stood out when it was released. While he praised the filmmaking, Cameron criticized Nolan for avoiding direct depictions of the atomic bomb’s impact on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, calling the choice a “moral cop-out.”
“There’s only one brief moment where he sees some charred bodies in the audience and then the film goes on to show how it deeply moved him,” Cameron said about Oppenheimer.
“But I felt that it dodged the subject. I don’t know whether the studio or Chris felt that that was a third rail that they didn’t want to touch, but I want to go straight at the third rail. I’m just stupid that way.”
The difference, in Cameron’s eyes, comes down to reality versus allegory. Oppenheimer tells a true story tied to real deaths and historical trauma. A House of Dynamite is a fictional morality play designed to trap the audience in the same impossible position as its characters. For Cameron, spelling out the final choice would let viewers off the hook too easily.
What do you think? Did you like the ending of A House of Dynamite?