Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such titles can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A prominent example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to reflect on the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story assumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
