Oct. 28, 2025
Just Watched the Netflix Hit Everybody is Talking About. We Get Why You're Mad.
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RSS Feed We just watched “House of Dynamite” to understand the growing controversy over the film’s premise and its surprising ending. For those of you who haven’t watched yet, don’t worry, there are no spoilers in the first half of this episode, so you’re safe until the break… but then we fully go there! We talk about our reaction to the movie’s ending, why the Pentagon feels the need to set the record straight with viewers, and the movie’s writer defending the accuracy of the film.
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00:00:02
Speaker 1: Hey, there're folks. It is Tuesday, October twenty eighth, and haven't you heard everybody is really worked up about this new hit Netflix movie House of Dynamite. We just watched it and now we see why. And with that, welcome to this episode of Amy and TJ. Rohobes. Is it justified folks have really worked up about this?
00:00:24
Speaker 2: Well, it's an exceptionally good movie and you're along for the whole ride. You are waiting at the edge of your seat for what's going to happen. Tick talk, tick talk, And then I would just say, as you pointed out, oh I should save that.
00:00:44
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm wondering I should we say ahead of time this will be a spoiler free episode. Can we make sure we don't give anything away? Or should we openly and fully discussed We didn't discuss.
00:00:55
Speaker 2: This before we get we didn't, But what about this the first half? Maybe before we go to break, we won't give a spoiler. But I don't see how we have a full conversation about this movie without revealing a spoiler, and so maybe we do it after the break.
00:01:10
Speaker 1: Okay, we will make sure we give a heads up before anything even resembling a spoiler comes out.
00:01:18
Speaker 2: That's fair because I don't think you can talk about why people are upset without discussing the end of the movie.
00:01:24
Speaker 1: Okay, so you think we'll start with that. Do you think the only issue or the main issue folks that have would just be with the ending.
00:01:31
Speaker 2: Yes, one hundred percent, And I would say that that is and was my only issue. I thought it was an amazing movie, really really good, with phenomenal actors.
00:01:44
Speaker 1: Yeah. So if folks don't know this movie House of Dynamite, I didn't. I saw some of the posters and advertisements for but I didn't really understand what it was about. But it's a new thriller I came out over the weekend on Netflix. Is about two hours long. Described this way from Academy Award winning director Catherine Bigelow. When a single unattributed missile is launched to the United States, a race begins to determine who is responsible in how to respond. That's yeah, accurate.
00:02:16
Speaker 2: Catherine Bigelow of The hurt Locker, a very phenomenal film. She knows her well. She knows what she's doing when it comes to making movies about war or impending war or just the just it's her lane for sure, and this movie confirms it, and it.
00:02:33
Speaker 1: Has all that intensity you expect from her. So in that response, it's from that perspective. It is fantastic. Now, the cast fantastic. Itris Elba and he actually plays the president in this movie. Rebecca Ferguson. If you don't know the name, you'll know her and recognize her from Mission Impossible movies. Jared Harris, Anthony Ramos of course, he's a singer, Broadway star and actor as well. Was in Hamilton. And Jason Clark, who has been in everything you know.
00:03:02
Speaker 2: Oh, I was just gonna say, I feel like every single actor that came up, it was a familiar face. I didn't know their names, but I'm like, oh that guy, oh her, oh him, you know, it was every every actor that I've seen on every IT movie or show from White Lotus. Yeah, I just feel like everyone in this film is recognizable and has an amazing resume.
00:03:29
Speaker 1: Even a Angel Reese's appearance and there to throw that one in as well. So the cast, the way it's shot, everything is fantastic. Now we'll give more of our opinion on it, but this is one The audience robes and the critics pretty evenly.
00:03:47
Speaker 2: Splayed Yes, Rotten Tomatoes seventy nine percent, audience score seventy seven percent. And you know something that was interesting When you said the run time was an hour fifty two, I have to admit I was a little shocked. It went by very very quickly for me.
00:04:01
Speaker 1: Did you know it was going to be formatted the way it was done?
00:04:04
Speaker 2: I did not, So we can tell people to format Oh, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So it's basically the same twenty minutes from the perspective of several different characters. So you're seeing what's happening on the ground. Basically, you're seeing what's happening with the troops, You're seeing what's happening with the president, You're seeing what's happening with the Defense Secretary, all the different folks who play a huge role in responding or attempting to respond to some sort of national security threat.
00:04:32
Speaker 1: I've seen movies done this way. We just saw on this year, Weapons was done this way where you're seeing the same chunk of time just from different people's perspectives. I did read a couple of reviews where people had took an issue with that because you're only seeing twenty minutes, and you're just seeing twenty minutes over and over. Yeah, I don't mind it. I like that kind of storytelling, and this was.
00:04:52
Speaker 2: Done well, I don't mind that at all. I actually think it's pretty cool. I've read books like that where each chapter is going over the same thing but through a different person's perspective. I always think it's cool because, yeah, it's not always the same. Although this one didn't really vary at all. It wasn't someone's perspective that changed it. Actually all was the same. You're just seeing it from a different person's vantage point.
00:05:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, I really liked I was done. And the first twenty minutes of this movie, you're hooked.
00:05:16
Speaker 2: Oh my heart was pounding. I was getting chills. I was in it.
00:05:22
Speaker 1: So a big part of this movie, of course, is the United States trying to find out who launched this missile against the country and to possibly shoot it down. Now the Pentagon has now gotten involved, the.
00:05:36
Speaker 2: Actual Pentagon, the actual United States kind of got not in the movie, but in real life.
00:05:42
Speaker 1: The real one has gotten involved, and Bloomberg, the news agency, has acquired a memo, an internal memo in which the Pentagon is essentially defending its missile defense system against some of the claims in the movie.
00:05:57
Speaker 2: Wait, I thought that they had just stopped all eeks set the Pentagon. I thought they kicked out all the media who didn't sign a paper.
00:06:04
Speaker 1: And you know what, Bloomberg made the point in their reporting on this to say, we're doing this reporting, and we are doing it after we got kicked out, and we didn't sign a pledge, meaning they wouldn't have been able to report this had they signed they signed the.
00:06:23
Speaker 2: Pledge, and meaning that there are still folks willing to talk to members of the press even though they're not supposed to.
00:06:29
Speaker 1: And so there you go.
00:06:30
Speaker 2: But that's a good thing.
00:06:31
Speaker 1: Really, you know what, didn't solve any problem.
00:06:34
Speaker 2: That actually hearing that and just putting those two things together actually just made me feel safer as a United States citizen.
00:06:42
Speaker 1: All right. So this internal memo that Bloomberg got their hands on was essentially the Pentagon trying to tell or give I guess leadership a heads up about some questions they might get about the missile defense system. And a couple of excerpts will share here from the top. You could start with the first one.
00:06:59
Speaker 2: So, yeah, this is from the memo. The fictional interceptors in the movie missed their target. I guess we didn't tell everyone that, but that does happen when they're trying to take out this nuclear weapon that's headed towards Chicago. The fictional interceptors in the movie miss their target. And we understand this is intended to be a compelling part of the drama, intended for the entertainment of the audience.
00:07:22
Speaker 1: Yes, they say that it's essentially right there, Robes. They're saying, we understand this is just a movie. But they go on to defend it by saying, and I quote, the system displayed a one hundred percent accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade. Now, a big part of this movie is the fan. As far, the best line of the movie was the guy going off about how much we spend, which is fifty plus billion for this thing, and it's a coin toss to only it's just a fifty to fifty.
00:07:54
Speaker 2: It's just a coin toss. And then one of them, the other actors, says, basically, we're shoe up a bullet to try and take out a bullet. That's how precise it has to be. And so in the movie. When he was forced to tell the truth about the accuracy rate, he said it was at about sixty one percent.
00:08:11
Speaker 1: It was a big moment in the movie.
00:08:13
Speaker 2: Not one hundred percent. Sixty one percent.
00:08:15
Speaker 1: Yes, And there are other reports out there, official testing we looked up that says the test show a fifty five percent accuracy rate.
00:08:23
Speaker 2: So the movie was actually being generous generous to our accuracy rate in taking out some sort of impending missile.
00:08:31
Speaker 1: But if you're being told that your tax dollars are going towards a fifty to one hundred billion dollar system, so that you living in Lower Manhattan, if a missile is shot directly towards you, we can knock it out of the sky, but our chances are only about fifty five percent. How would you feel you.
00:08:51
Speaker 2: Had me until that last bit. I was going to say, and that's how I sleep at night, and that's how paying taxes every year makes it feel worthy of that ginormous effort. But when you ended the sentence with with a fifty to fifty percent success rate or it's a coin toss or whatever, that that makes me feel actually sick to my stomach.
00:09:14
Speaker 1: Okay, so the Pentagon wants you to know it's okay, it's a one hundred percent accurate And now again I say, the Pentagon wants you to know it was an internal memo acquired by Bloomberg. But they are saying in this memo again I'm going to quote it here, but they want to make sure leadership quote has situational awareness and is not surprised by the topic which may come up in conversations or meetings. So they're trying to give everybody a heads up. You might get asked how accurate is our system and they're being told it's one hundred percent accurate. But there are a few butts. We're actually going to explain how they might be justified with their one hundred percent radio I'll get to that in just a second. Now, what the writer, Noah Oppenheim, is taking issue with what the Pentagon is saying. Yes, because they went through a lot of research for this movie.
00:10:06
Speaker 2: And Noah Oppenheim, by the way, used to be a big dog at NBC News, So this is somebody who has a long history in journalism in a leadership position at a major US network, and of course is a writer as well. But he said he respectfully disagrees with the Pentagon, and we'll go on to say what else he said. He said, I'm not a missile defense expert, but I did talk to many missile defense experts who were all on the record. We just asked them a ton of questions. How does it work, what are the processes, what are the procedures? So what you see on screen is hopefully a fairly accurate portrait of the reality that exists. He said. Unfortunately, our missile defense system is highly imperfect. If the Pentagon wants to have a conversation about improving it or what the next step might be in keeping all of us safer, that's the conversation we want to have. What we show in the movie is accurate, and that was in the movie. We just watched it. Yeah, they said sixty one percent accuracy, and we watched in the movie two of the missile defense what are they called GDIs gbis miss the target in the movie.
00:11:19
Speaker 1: Ground based interceptors is what they call them, and we do have them in real life. They're kept in California and in Alaska, most of them in Alaska, about forty or so. But they say these things are we should sleep easy at night.
00:11:34
Speaker 2: Well, honestly, I actually do and have up until now. That is the truth. I mean, it was my understanding that it was one hundred percent accurate, or that there's no way if we saw it coming in that we would miss it.
00:11:51
Speaker 1: Did the movie scare you, Yes, it did.
00:11:55
Speaker 2: It scared me, especially in these times. Look, this is everyone probably says that no matter what decade they lived in. But I feel like the tensions, like just what we're seeing in Ukraine, what we're seeing in Russia, what we're seeing in the Middle East, and just even when we do feel like we make progress, it's one step forward, two steps back, and every rhetoric just seems to be at its height, and words are weapons. And I just I think everyone's a little bit on edge with the tension and the division that we not only have in the world but in our own country.
00:12:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, it feels unstable. So yet I think the movie is timely and that it really really strikes a nerve. But stay with us, folks will tell you why so many folks are upset, in particular about the ending, and yes, spoiler alert, we will be talking about exactly what happened. Also why the Pentagon in arguing that the missile defense system is one hundred percent correct. Why they might actually have an argument.
00:13:00
Speaker 2: Say here, continuing our conversation about the movie that everyone is talking about, the Netflix film House of Dynamite. It dropped over the weekend. It's been number one on Netflix and certainly a huge topic of conversation among folks who've seen it. Certainly folks online and a lot of people are just downright pissed at how this thing ended.
00:13:34
Speaker 1: Well, what do you want? We want a nice little bow on it. There's supposed to be an ending, a conclusion to the story, and I guess we we watch a story and then we don't know how the story ends.
00:13:46
Speaker 2: That's annoying. Think about it from the beginning of when you're a kid, like your parents are reading you a bedtime book, they just don't tell you the ending. That's you're not going to go to sleep. You're going to be staying up all night thinking about how it ended, or how it should have ended, or what you wish the author had written. I mean, maybe that's the intention, and I get that from a creative standpoint. However, I do think you kind of got out of actually having to give us an ending, and somehow I feel like you kind of weaseled your way out of actually giving us a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
00:14:18
Speaker 1: Okay, obviously, I know you're not suggesting that there was a weasling out you're talking about in general, I know you're not talking.
00:14:24
Speaker 2: About No, of course, like that, Academy Award winning directors can know much more about art than I do. Yes, I.
00:14:34
Speaker 1: I didn't know what was going to happen and why people were so upset, and then I took a beat. I took a beat, and before the credits were even done rolling, I'm like, ah, maybe she was making a bigger point than I was giving the movie credit for. So yes, FELK, we're gonna spoiler one more time if you want to hop out. But this is going to be a full spoiler alert here now. But the movie goes through twenty minutes of time, and there are different perspectives of different people who are involved in trying to figure out where this missile is coming from and how to keep it from hitting the United.
00:15:10
Speaker 2: States and how to respond.
00:15:12
Speaker 1: And the response what there should be. So there's twenty minutes of time is what we get because they have the countdown of when the thing is going to hit Chicago, and it's going to hit in twenty minutes. So you see the same twenty minutes over and over and over again, and then at the end, when the twenty minutes is out, on the last segment, we have no idea what happened to Chicago, and no idea what decision the president.
00:15:42
Speaker 2: Made cut to black and look. I understand the conversation that we're now having, and honestly, even the frustration or downright anger that some people feel after having invested two hours of their time into this movie to want a conclusion. Perhaps that's getting us to talk about it even more. And that's exactly what Catherine Bigelow and Noah Oppenheim were hoping for. And if that was the intention, bravo. You all did an excellent job, and the whole entire movie was phenomenal. I just feel cheated out of the resolution, and I understand that that's probably how a lot of people feel. Because those twenty minutes were so intense, and then you had to relive them through different perspectives, you are even more invested, like you can't wait, like you had to wait, then you had to wait again, then you had to wait again, and now finally you're gonna find out what happened, and you never do. That is deeply unsatisfying.
00:16:39
Speaker 1: Simply, I am with you, simply a you're speaking as a moviegoer. You're sitting down as a person who wants to be entertained. And stories do follow a very simple.
00:16:49
Speaker 2: Arc, and that is why people have a Netflix subscription because they want to be entertained.
00:16:55
Speaker 1: Okay, but okay, I am with you sitting as just some by as a moviegoer. I respect it now as a citizen, possibly because maybe the conversation, which is a worthy one, about the building up and our stance as well. We need to build up our we needed to be a deterrent our military stance and all of these complicated systems we have. They even had a mention in there to possibly an AI launching this thing. So it scares the hell out of you. And think about where we are with our military positioning. Why do we need to see the end of the story, need to know whether there's a disaster or not to change how we view our military stance in this country.
00:17:43
Speaker 2: Look, I hear you on another level, on a political level, on a yes, but on an entertainment level, you need this, I thought cheated, But I understand, like in my head as I was, because I didn't know how it was going to end. I just knew people were upset about it. I actually thought that they were going to have Chicago actually go up in smoke, and I thought, Wow, they're really going to do this because people are upset. It actually didn't dawn on me that I wasn't going to find out what happened until right towards the end that I thought, you know what, they're not going to show it. They're not going to tell us what happened. And I even thought they would tell us what happened and not show it because it would be too hard to watch. Look, I was actually thinking from the perspective of creating this movie and how real it seemed. It was too real. It felt too real too where we are it was going to be, like I can't imagine how actually frightening it would have been had they shown something catastrophic happening.
00:18:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, the build up to this, and I was actually reading Robes and again to your point of cutting off seeing the cat the catastrophe of Chicago, there is like a couple of devastating family scenes in this movie, like they are gutting to see. And the consultant that worked with them on the movie was essentially doing an interview saying what they got right and what they got wrong. They say, yeah, they some of the mechanics of it. They say, yeah, we a is in the military. We see the mechanics. Okay, emergency because we do these drills. We do all these drills. They say. What they nailed is what we don't get to see is a human reaction to having to do a real time. He said, we never had to do that because we just did drills. He said he really appreciated seeing this guy's a young father, this person has a daughter in this city. That he said, they really appreciated that they nailed that.
00:19:42
Speaker 2: Part yeah, and part of you were yelling at the TV, get it together. You're first line of defense if you can't keep emotion out of this and nothing's gonna save us, No one's gonna save us. But I was like, honestly, those are human beings who have jobs, and yes they understand how important they are, but they've never really been put to the test of where you know information and your loved ones are potentially absolutely in the line of fire. What do you do? Do you break down? Do you put in that phone call, do you try to get somebody out? Do you yeah, all of those things? Do you basically do you leave the oath behind in a way, or at least, you know, fudge the rules a little bit because you're a human being trying to get one last call to mom or tell your daughter you love them, or even try to get somebody out of harm's way.
00:20:35
Speaker 1: I get it. I get it. If I were in their precision, I'd probably do the same thing. But I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who is living in Chicago and the people in charge of whether or not I am going to get hit with a nuclear winter. I don't want them stepping out in the hallway.
00:20:53
Speaker 2: And breaking down crying.
00:20:55
Speaker 1: I don't want it. I need eyes front, I need focus right now for people. So that is where I was coming from.
00:21:01
Speaker 2: That's where your perspective was. You're like, stop it with the tears thrown man crying.
00:21:08
Speaker 1: I did not say that.
00:21:09
Speaker 2: You didn't, but you were thinking it.
00:21:11
Speaker 1: I know you given me as much as I cried. Anyway, Folks, check the movie out. It is that first twenty minute. Oh my god, all we had to do is tell you to watch the first twenty and you're hooked. You ever watched the rest?
00:21:21
Speaker 2: It's intense, And look, I do think all jokes aside and my feeling of dissatisfaction at the end, it was still such a good movie to watch, and it was a thought provoking movie. And the fact that the Pentagon even felt the need to respond and send out a memo and actually prepare for their response to what is real and what is not is actually fascinating in and of itself.
00:21:42
Speaker 1: Oh well, goodness, I forgot to answer the question why the Pentagon might be right? Yes, with the experts tell you, there's no way if a missile is coming towards the United States that we're just going to shoot one missile back at it. Like you said, bullet hit in a bullet, it would be like four bullets trying to hit that other boat. They would, they would, so they might have one hundred percent success rate when they fire multiple interceptors at it.
00:22:07
Speaker 2: Okay, that's okay, But we haven't had to test that, have we not, or I mean, obviously real.
00:22:15
Speaker 1: Time no over the United States?
00:22:16
Speaker 2: No, right, yes, so that that is a fascinating thing to consider and scary as as it gets. But I will say it was interesting hearing those percentages and then you were looking up in real time because when they talked about we only would send up The reason why they defended in the movie only sending up two different gbis was that they said, we only have fifty and if we're under attack and there are more of these to come, we have to save what we have. Basically, we can't save Chicago because we have to save the rest of America in case there are more. That didn't seem totally plausible to me. It feels like we would have done everything we could to save ten million people.
00:22:57
Speaker 1: Oh thank god I wasn't mobile. I mean I have been taking the time.
00:23:02
Speaker 2: If it was DC, they would have thrown off.
00:23:04
Speaker 1: Oh oh god, you make a good point. And they make some of those political points in the movie. There's very little humor, but the couple of lines they have they absolutely do nail. And I loved idests alway as the president. He was cool.
00:23:19
Speaker 2: Everybody was so good. I thought it was an excellent movie. Highly recommend And yeah, I would love to hear what you all think about the ending as well after you've watched, but thank you for listening to us. We appreciate you as always. I made me Robock alongside DJ Holmes. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1: Hey, there're folks. It is Tuesday, October twenty eighth, and haven't you heard everybody is really worked up about this new hit Netflix movie House of Dynamite. We just watched it and now we see why. And with that, welcome to this episode of Amy and TJ. Rohobes. Is it justified folks have really worked up about this?
00:00:24
Speaker 2: Well, it's an exceptionally good movie and you're along for the whole ride. You are waiting at the edge of your seat for what's going to happen. Tick talk, tick talk, And then I would just say, as you pointed out, oh I should save that.
00:00:44
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm wondering I should we say ahead of time this will be a spoiler free episode. Can we make sure we don't give anything away? Or should we openly and fully discussed We didn't discuss.
00:00:55
Speaker 2: This before we get we didn't, But what about this the first half? Maybe before we go to break, we won't give a spoiler. But I don't see how we have a full conversation about this movie without revealing a spoiler, and so maybe we do it after the break.
00:01:10
Speaker 1: Okay, we will make sure we give a heads up before anything even resembling a spoiler comes out.
00:01:18
Speaker 2: That's fair because I don't think you can talk about why people are upset without discussing the end of the movie.
00:01:24
Speaker 1: Okay, so you think we'll start with that. Do you think the only issue or the main issue folks that have would just be with the ending.
00:01:31
Speaker 2: Yes, one hundred percent, And I would say that that is and was my only issue. I thought it was an amazing movie, really really good, with phenomenal actors.
00:01:44
Speaker 1: Yeah. So if folks don't know this movie House of Dynamite, I didn't. I saw some of the posters and advertisements for but I didn't really understand what it was about. But it's a new thriller I came out over the weekend on Netflix. Is about two hours long. Described this way from Academy Award winning director Catherine Bigelow. When a single unattributed missile is launched to the United States, a race begins to determine who is responsible in how to respond. That's yeah, accurate.
00:02:16
Speaker 2: Catherine Bigelow of The hurt Locker, a very phenomenal film. She knows her well. She knows what she's doing when it comes to making movies about war or impending war or just the just it's her lane for sure, and this movie confirms it, and it.
00:02:33
Speaker 1: Has all that intensity you expect from her. So in that response, it's from that perspective. It is fantastic. Now, the cast fantastic. Itris Elba and he actually plays the president in this movie. Rebecca Ferguson. If you don't know the name, you'll know her and recognize her from Mission Impossible movies. Jared Harris, Anthony Ramos of course, he's a singer, Broadway star and actor as well. Was in Hamilton. And Jason Clark, who has been in everything you know.
00:03:02
Speaker 2: Oh, I was just gonna say, I feel like every single actor that came up, it was a familiar face. I didn't know their names, but I'm like, oh that guy, oh her, oh him, you know, it was every every actor that I've seen on every IT movie or show from White Lotus. Yeah, I just feel like everyone in this film is recognizable and has an amazing resume.
00:03:29
Speaker 1: Even a Angel Reese's appearance and there to throw that one in as well. So the cast, the way it's shot, everything is fantastic. Now we'll give more of our opinion on it, but this is one The audience robes and the critics pretty evenly.
00:03:47
Speaker 2: Splayed Yes, Rotten Tomatoes seventy nine percent, audience score seventy seven percent. And you know something that was interesting When you said the run time was an hour fifty two, I have to admit I was a little shocked. It went by very very quickly for me.
00:04:01
Speaker 1: Did you know it was going to be formatted the way it was done?
00:04:04
Speaker 2: I did not, So we can tell people to format Oh, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So it's basically the same twenty minutes from the perspective of several different characters. So you're seeing what's happening on the ground. Basically, you're seeing what's happening with the troops, You're seeing what's happening with the president, You're seeing what's happening with the Defense Secretary, all the different folks who play a huge role in responding or attempting to respond to some sort of national security threat.
00:04:32
Speaker 1: I've seen movies done this way. We just saw on this year, Weapons was done this way where you're seeing the same chunk of time just from different people's perspectives. I did read a couple of reviews where people had took an issue with that because you're only seeing twenty minutes, and you're just seeing twenty minutes over and over. Yeah, I don't mind it. I like that kind of storytelling, and this was.
00:04:52
Speaker 2: Done well, I don't mind that at all. I actually think it's pretty cool. I've read books like that where each chapter is going over the same thing but through a different person's perspective. I always think it's cool because, yeah, it's not always the same. Although this one didn't really vary at all. It wasn't someone's perspective that changed it. Actually all was the same. You're just seeing it from a different person's vantage point.
00:05:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, I really liked I was done. And the first twenty minutes of this movie, you're hooked.
00:05:16
Speaker 2: Oh my heart was pounding. I was getting chills. I was in it.
00:05:22
Speaker 1: So a big part of this movie, of course, is the United States trying to find out who launched this missile against the country and to possibly shoot it down. Now the Pentagon has now gotten involved, the.
00:05:36
Speaker 2: Actual Pentagon, the actual United States kind of got not in the movie, but in real life.
00:05:42
Speaker 1: The real one has gotten involved, and Bloomberg, the news agency, has acquired a memo, an internal memo in which the Pentagon is essentially defending its missile defense system against some of the claims in the movie.
00:05:57
Speaker 2: Wait, I thought that they had just stopped all eeks set the Pentagon. I thought they kicked out all the media who didn't sign a paper.
00:06:04
Speaker 1: And you know what, Bloomberg made the point in their reporting on this to say, we're doing this reporting, and we are doing it after we got kicked out, and we didn't sign a pledge, meaning they wouldn't have been able to report this had they signed they signed the.
00:06:23
Speaker 2: Pledge, and meaning that there are still folks willing to talk to members of the press even though they're not supposed to.
00:06:29
Speaker 1: And so there you go.
00:06:30
Speaker 2: But that's a good thing.
00:06:31
Speaker 1: Really, you know what, didn't solve any problem.
00:06:34
Speaker 2: That actually hearing that and just putting those two things together actually just made me feel safer as a United States citizen.
00:06:42
Speaker 1: All right. So this internal memo that Bloomberg got their hands on was essentially the Pentagon trying to tell or give I guess leadership a heads up about some questions they might get about the missile defense system. And a couple of excerpts will share here from the top. You could start with the first one.
00:06:59
Speaker 2: So, yeah, this is from the memo. The fictional interceptors in the movie missed their target. I guess we didn't tell everyone that, but that does happen when they're trying to take out this nuclear weapon that's headed towards Chicago. The fictional interceptors in the movie miss their target. And we understand this is intended to be a compelling part of the drama, intended for the entertainment of the audience.
00:07:22
Speaker 1: Yes, they say that it's essentially right there, Robes. They're saying, we understand this is just a movie. But they go on to defend it by saying, and I quote, the system displayed a one hundred percent accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade. Now, a big part of this movie is the fan. As far, the best line of the movie was the guy going off about how much we spend, which is fifty plus billion for this thing, and it's a coin toss to only it's just a fifty to fifty.
00:07:54
Speaker 2: It's just a coin toss. And then one of them, the other actors, says, basically, we're shoe up a bullet to try and take out a bullet. That's how precise it has to be. And so in the movie. When he was forced to tell the truth about the accuracy rate, he said it was at about sixty one percent.
00:08:11
Speaker 1: It was a big moment in the movie.
00:08:13
Speaker 2: Not one hundred percent. Sixty one percent.
00:08:15
Speaker 1: Yes, And there are other reports out there, official testing we looked up that says the test show a fifty five percent accuracy rate.
00:08:23
Speaker 2: So the movie was actually being generous generous to our accuracy rate in taking out some sort of impending missile.
00:08:31
Speaker 1: But if you're being told that your tax dollars are going towards a fifty to one hundred billion dollar system, so that you living in Lower Manhattan, if a missile is shot directly towards you, we can knock it out of the sky, but our chances are only about fifty five percent. How would you feel you.
00:08:51
Speaker 2: Had me until that last bit. I was going to say, and that's how I sleep at night, and that's how paying taxes every year makes it feel worthy of that ginormous effort. But when you ended the sentence with with a fifty to fifty percent success rate or it's a coin toss or whatever, that that makes me feel actually sick to my stomach.
00:09:14
Speaker 1: Okay, so the Pentagon wants you to know it's okay, it's a one hundred percent accurate And now again I say, the Pentagon wants you to know it was an internal memo acquired by Bloomberg. But they are saying in this memo again I'm going to quote it here, but they want to make sure leadership quote has situational awareness and is not surprised by the topic which may come up in conversations or meetings. So they're trying to give everybody a heads up. You might get asked how accurate is our system and they're being told it's one hundred percent accurate. But there are a few butts. We're actually going to explain how they might be justified with their one hundred percent radio I'll get to that in just a second. Now, what the writer, Noah Oppenheim, is taking issue with what the Pentagon is saying. Yes, because they went through a lot of research for this movie.
00:10:06
Speaker 2: And Noah Oppenheim, by the way, used to be a big dog at NBC News, So this is somebody who has a long history in journalism in a leadership position at a major US network, and of course is a writer as well. But he said he respectfully disagrees with the Pentagon, and we'll go on to say what else he said. He said, I'm not a missile defense expert, but I did talk to many missile defense experts who were all on the record. We just asked them a ton of questions. How does it work, what are the processes, what are the procedures? So what you see on screen is hopefully a fairly accurate portrait of the reality that exists. He said. Unfortunately, our missile defense system is highly imperfect. If the Pentagon wants to have a conversation about improving it or what the next step might be in keeping all of us safer, that's the conversation we want to have. What we show in the movie is accurate, and that was in the movie. We just watched it. Yeah, they said sixty one percent accuracy, and we watched in the movie two of the missile defense what are they called GDIs gbis miss the target in the movie.
00:11:19
Speaker 1: Ground based interceptors is what they call them, and we do have them in real life. They're kept in California and in Alaska, most of them in Alaska, about forty or so. But they say these things are we should sleep easy at night.
00:11:34
Speaker 2: Well, honestly, I actually do and have up until now. That is the truth. I mean, it was my understanding that it was one hundred percent accurate, or that there's no way if we saw it coming in that we would miss it.
00:11:51
Speaker 1: Did the movie scare you, Yes, it did.
00:11:55
Speaker 2: It scared me, especially in these times. Look, this is everyone probably says that no matter what decade they lived in. But I feel like the tensions, like just what we're seeing in Ukraine, what we're seeing in Russia, what we're seeing in the Middle East, and just even when we do feel like we make progress, it's one step forward, two steps back, and every rhetoric just seems to be at its height, and words are weapons. And I just I think everyone's a little bit on edge with the tension and the division that we not only have in the world but in our own country.
00:12:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, it feels unstable. So yet I think the movie is timely and that it really really strikes a nerve. But stay with us, folks will tell you why so many folks are upset, in particular about the ending, and yes, spoiler alert, we will be talking about exactly what happened. Also why the Pentagon in arguing that the missile defense system is one hundred percent correct. Why they might actually have an argument.
00:13:00
Speaker 2: Say here, continuing our conversation about the movie that everyone is talking about, the Netflix film House of Dynamite. It dropped over the weekend. It's been number one on Netflix and certainly a huge topic of conversation among folks who've seen it. Certainly folks online and a lot of people are just downright pissed at how this thing ended.
00:13:34
Speaker 1: Well, what do you want? We want a nice little bow on it. There's supposed to be an ending, a conclusion to the story, and I guess we we watch a story and then we don't know how the story ends.
00:13:46
Speaker 2: That's annoying. Think about it from the beginning of when you're a kid, like your parents are reading you a bedtime book, they just don't tell you the ending. That's you're not going to go to sleep. You're going to be staying up all night thinking about how it ended, or how it should have ended, or what you wish the author had written. I mean, maybe that's the intention, and I get that from a creative standpoint. However, I do think you kind of got out of actually having to give us an ending, and somehow I feel like you kind of weaseled your way out of actually giving us a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
00:14:18
Speaker 1: Okay, obviously, I know you're not suggesting that there was a weasling out you're talking about in general, I know you're not talking.
00:14:24
Speaker 2: About No, of course, like that, Academy Award winning directors can know much more about art than I do. Yes, I.
00:14:34
Speaker 1: I didn't know what was going to happen and why people were so upset, and then I took a beat. I took a beat, and before the credits were even done rolling, I'm like, ah, maybe she was making a bigger point than I was giving the movie credit for. So yes, FELK, we're gonna spoiler one more time if you want to hop out. But this is going to be a full spoiler alert here now. But the movie goes through twenty minutes of time, and there are different perspectives of different people who are involved in trying to figure out where this missile is coming from and how to keep it from hitting the United.
00:15:10
Speaker 2: States and how to respond.
00:15:12
Speaker 1: And the response what there should be. So there's twenty minutes of time is what we get because they have the countdown of when the thing is going to hit Chicago, and it's going to hit in twenty minutes. So you see the same twenty minutes over and over and over again, and then at the end, when the twenty minutes is out, on the last segment, we have no idea what happened to Chicago, and no idea what decision the president.
00:15:42
Speaker 2: Made cut to black and look. I understand the conversation that we're now having, and honestly, even the frustration or downright anger that some people feel after having invested two hours of their time into this movie to want a conclusion. Perhaps that's getting us to talk about it even more. And that's exactly what Catherine Bigelow and Noah Oppenheim were hoping for. And if that was the intention, bravo. You all did an excellent job, and the whole entire movie was phenomenal. I just feel cheated out of the resolution, and I understand that that's probably how a lot of people feel. Because those twenty minutes were so intense, and then you had to relive them through different perspectives, you are even more invested, like you can't wait, like you had to wait, then you had to wait again, then you had to wait again, and now finally you're gonna find out what happened, and you never do. That is deeply unsatisfying.
00:16:39
Speaker 1: Simply, I am with you, simply a you're speaking as a moviegoer. You're sitting down as a person who wants to be entertained. And stories do follow a very simple.
00:16:49
Speaker 2: Arc, and that is why people have a Netflix subscription because they want to be entertained.
00:16:55
Speaker 1: Okay, but okay, I am with you sitting as just some by as a moviegoer. I respect it now as a citizen, possibly because maybe the conversation, which is a worthy one, about the building up and our stance as well. We need to build up our we needed to be a deterrent our military stance and all of these complicated systems we have. They even had a mention in there to possibly an AI launching this thing. So it scares the hell out of you. And think about where we are with our military positioning. Why do we need to see the end of the story, need to know whether there's a disaster or not to change how we view our military stance in this country.
00:17:43
Speaker 2: Look, I hear you on another level, on a political level, on a yes, but on an entertainment level, you need this, I thought cheated, But I understand, like in my head as I was, because I didn't know how it was going to end. I just knew people were upset about it. I actually thought that they were going to have Chicago actually go up in smoke, and I thought, Wow, they're really going to do this because people are upset. It actually didn't dawn on me that I wasn't going to find out what happened until right towards the end that I thought, you know what, they're not going to show it. They're not going to tell us what happened. And I even thought they would tell us what happened and not show it because it would be too hard to watch. Look, I was actually thinking from the perspective of creating this movie and how real it seemed. It was too real. It felt too real too where we are it was going to be, like I can't imagine how actually frightening it would have been had they shown something catastrophic happening.
00:18:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, the build up to this, and I was actually reading Robes and again to your point of cutting off seeing the cat the catastrophe of Chicago, there is like a couple of devastating family scenes in this movie, like they are gutting to see. And the consultant that worked with them on the movie was essentially doing an interview saying what they got right and what they got wrong. They say, yeah, they some of the mechanics of it. They say, yeah, we a is in the military. We see the mechanics. Okay, emergency because we do these drills. We do all these drills. They say. What they nailed is what we don't get to see is a human reaction to having to do a real time. He said, we never had to do that because we just did drills. He said he really appreciated seeing this guy's a young father, this person has a daughter in this city. That he said, they really appreciated that they nailed that.
00:19:42
Speaker 2: Part yeah, and part of you were yelling at the TV, get it together. You're first line of defense if you can't keep emotion out of this and nothing's gonna save us, No one's gonna save us. But I was like, honestly, those are human beings who have jobs, and yes they understand how important they are, but they've never really been put to the test of where you know information and your loved ones are potentially absolutely in the line of fire. What do you do? Do you break down? Do you put in that phone call, do you try to get somebody out? Do you yeah, all of those things? Do you basically do you leave the oath behind in a way, or at least, you know, fudge the rules a little bit because you're a human being trying to get one last call to mom or tell your daughter you love them, or even try to get somebody out of harm's way.
00:20:35
Speaker 1: I get it. I get it. If I were in their precision, I'd probably do the same thing. But I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who is living in Chicago and the people in charge of whether or not I am going to get hit with a nuclear winter. I don't want them stepping out in the hallway.
00:20:53
Speaker 2: And breaking down crying.
00:20:55
Speaker 1: I don't want it. I need eyes front, I need focus right now for people. So that is where I was coming from.
00:21:01
Speaker 2: That's where your perspective was. You're like, stop it with the tears thrown man crying.
00:21:08
Speaker 1: I did not say that.
00:21:09
Speaker 2: You didn't, but you were thinking it.
00:21:11
Speaker 1: I know you given me as much as I cried. Anyway, Folks, check the movie out. It is that first twenty minute. Oh my god, all we had to do is tell you to watch the first twenty and you're hooked. You ever watched the rest?
00:21:21
Speaker 2: It's intense, And look, I do think all jokes aside and my feeling of dissatisfaction at the end, it was still such a good movie to watch, and it was a thought provoking movie. And the fact that the Pentagon even felt the need to respond and send out a memo and actually prepare for their response to what is real and what is not is actually fascinating in and of itself.
00:21:42
Speaker 1: Oh well, goodness, I forgot to answer the question why the Pentagon might be right? Yes, with the experts tell you, there's no way if a missile is coming towards the United States that we're just going to shoot one missile back at it. Like you said, bullet hit in a bullet, it would be like four bullets trying to hit that other boat. They would, they would, so they might have one hundred percent success rate when they fire multiple interceptors at it.
00:22:07
Speaker 2: Okay, that's okay, But we haven't had to test that, have we not, or I mean, obviously real.
00:22:15
Speaker 1: Time no over the United States?
00:22:16
Speaker 2: No, right, yes, so that that is a fascinating thing to consider and scary as as it gets. But I will say it was interesting hearing those percentages and then you were looking up in real time because when they talked about we only would send up The reason why they defended in the movie only sending up two different gbis was that they said, we only have fifty and if we're under attack and there are more of these to come, we have to save what we have. Basically, we can't save Chicago because we have to save the rest of America in case there are more. That didn't seem totally plausible to me. It feels like we would have done everything we could to save ten million people.
00:22:57
Speaker 1: Oh thank god I wasn't mobile. I mean I have been taking the time.
00:23:02
Speaker 2: If it was DC, they would have thrown off.
00:23:04
Speaker 1: Oh oh god, you make a good point. And they make some of those political points in the movie. There's very little humor, but the couple of lines they have they absolutely do nail. And I loved idests alway as the president. He was cool.
00:23:19
Speaker 2: Everybody was so good. I thought it was an excellent movie. Highly recommend And yeah, I would love to hear what you all think about the ending as well after you've watched, but thank you for listening to us. We appreciate you as always. I made me Robock alongside DJ Holmes. We'll talk to you soon.