Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A notable instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, 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 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 director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the chronometer expires.
The answer – 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, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
