Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the chronometer reaches zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each repetition adding on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her best films as a Esteemed Director, 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 concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the negative impact Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
