A House of Dynamite

It literally has no ending. Just stops midway through, rolls credits and leaves a pile of plot lines with no finish or explanation.

Like reading the prologue and first three chapters of a book and then someone's torn out all the rest of the pages.

The ending isn't necessarily the problem, its the whole everything else. Unlike movies of similar structure such as Rashomon, which provides three 'different' perspectives on an incident, AHOD just retells the same story three times and by the time you hit the third section it becomes apparent that this is a just a third of a story stretched to a full movie. OK, grand, then in that instance (unlike Roshomon that leaves it to the audience to make up their mind on which story is the truth) you must provide the audience with a payoff. That is where the ending subsequently leaves everyone empty. Plenty of movies have left people in the dark successsfully….after a good movie beginning and middle.

Then the number of actors and their extended families we never meet. Nobody gets enough screen time for the audience to form any emotional attachment to anyone (Ferguson makes a good go of it though), so how can we care about your family members you ring off screen? Difficult to care for any consequences incoming.

Compare this to Chernobyl and the way an incident is related through a variety of perspectives and the incident was played down initially (only episdoe 4 goes into the explosion), this is not a difficult structure with payoff to deliver with emotional connection.

Given the amount of poor acting performances (bar Ferguson; but surprisingly Harris) also, it is difficult to find any positives from this. Not two hours wasted for me though…..I now know for definite that if I see Bigalows name on a future movie I will know it is not for me.

I wish I'd just stopped after the first 1/3. That was really good.

After that it just gets too emotional and the last 1/3 isn't realistic at all.