Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer expires.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, every iteration adding on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the harmful influence platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
