Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle 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 lens, cinema analysts may feel compelled to justify even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A prominent example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each repetition trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so once more it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly 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 portrays has been shattered completely.
