I don’t find it that hard to get anticipatory for a big new movie – I love watching films, and keeping on top of what’s coming to all of the biggest and best streaming services is a key part of my job, after all. Still, even by my own standards, I’m surprised at how much I want to watch A House of Dynamite when it arrives in cinemas about a month’s time.
The Netflix thriller looks unmissable, in my view, with a killer cast and the inimitable Kathryn Bigelow directing. The streamer clearly knows it’s got something good on its hands, too; it’s releasing the movie in theatres on 10 October, before waiting a couple of weeks to put it out on streaming, on 24 October. Netflix has done theatrical runs much shorter than that in the past, so it might have high hopes for the movie.
Based on the first round of critics’ reviews, it’s right to feel confident, too. The film currently boasts a 90% score on Rotten Tomatoes after a festival screening, and you could argue that those are some of the harder observers to please, too. With audiences (and me) forced to wait another month before they can watch it, it’ll be fascinating to see if that reception translates to popular success.
The film will seemingly take an extremely realistic and grounded approach to the question of what would play out in the US military and government in the event of a missile launch targeting its homeland soil. The movie looks like it likely opens with a day like any other inside the Pentagon (and some other locations), but soon turns into an unbelievably tense unfolding disaster when a lone missile without a clear point of origin is detected.
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The cast is absolutely stacked, from top to bottom – including some faces that we don’t even see in the teaser trailer that Netflix released this past week. Idris Elba has a role that isn’t named yet (don’t bet against it being presidential), while we do get looks at Rebecca Ferguson, Greta Lee, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris and Jason Clarke, all of whom have pretty tremendous CVs.
I’ll be catching this one in the cinema if I can, but it’s going to feel like a long month before I’m even allowed to do that.
