Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel obliged to justify even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such titles can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
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 broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed 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 deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
