Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel obliged to defend even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile example has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series 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 the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller 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 strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Previous 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 definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
