Bestowed upon an elite few, 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 prism, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such titles can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A prominent instance has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – 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 fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control 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 triggering event is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
