🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel pressured to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A prominent instance has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, 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 head once the chronometer reaches zero.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration adding on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.