How to End a Movie
Sidney Lumet, House of Dynamite & Weapons
I think inevitability is the key. In a well-made drama, I want to feel: “Of course—that’s where it was heading all along.” And yet the inevitability mustn’t eliminate surprise. There’s not much point in spending two hours on something that became clear in the first five minutes. Inevitability doesn’t mean predictability. The script must still keep you off balance, keep you surprised, entertaining, involved, and yet, when the denouement is reached, still give you the sense that the story had to turn out that way.
This is from Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies. I like the distinction between inevitability and predictability. I was mixed on the third act of Weapons, but the denouement was a perfect visual and thematic punchline to what turned out to be an elaborately constructed joke. Inevitable. My wife and I groaned around halfway through House of Dynamite, when it became clear that the movie’s reset-the-clock structure was a one-way ticket to a cop-out ending. Predictable.
House of Dynamite's main issue is that instead of being a 'feature length film', it should have been a 20-minute short film that followed each of the so many characters they wanted to follow and you could toggle between which person you wanted to follow.
But yes, after the first 'reset' you know the ending. Or that is to say you know the ending is open and what the movie is asking you. Leaving you more to focus on the information that is to come and see how the other characters handle the moral question. The first round is technical, the second is procedural, and the third is moral -- the order in which we experience crises. By the time you hit the third act reflects the way these events are "looked back on," as if it's already past and we're judging the characters the same way we would expect them to have known what we did not know in Act 1, and to have acted better than we have acted in Act 2. To me this is very smart, and there's no meaningful way to judge this movie by its ending.
Totally agree on HoD and Weapons.