🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel compelled to justify even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside 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 fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale 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 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of 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 standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation 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 – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.

The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, 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 era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.