It never occurred to me the explosions were due to poorly maintained systems, but that seems like a common interpretation, when I searched around it. It doesn'

It never occurred to me the explosions were due to poorly maintained systems, but that seems like a common interpretation, when I searched around it. It doesn't quite make sense to me though. If you take the explosions literally, ventilation systems don't tend to do that sort of thing, and if/when they do fail, it tends to be by suffocating everyone with freeon or carbon monoxide, not with explosive fireballs. Boilers can explode, but those are usually in basements, not at the floor level of a restaurant. Restaurant kitchens can and do regularly catch fire, as a result of failing to clean the grease out of cooktop exhaust filters. But again, this usually isn't an explosion. I suppose the explosions could be a kind of visual metaphor, for the way a small clerical error snowballed into a rolling deadly disaster due to the inhumane and inflexible nature of the bureaucracy. I'll have to watch the film again to see where all the explosions are- but while I think the explosions are evocative of societal failures, I'm not convinced they're purely metaphorical, or purely meant to be mechanical failures. The film was made in the historical context of the IRA bombing places in real life regularly, and the film would have been stupid to imply, in effect, that the IRA's bombings were government fiction. Edit: Just had another quick search around and it seems possible that the restaurant explosion scene, character reaction to it, and news rhetoric depicted around terrorism in general could have been inspired by this contemporary event (notably, Thatcher, like the characters in the film, attempted to carry on with the conference as if nothing had happened): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombing