Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, 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 interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each repetition adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
