Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat 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 measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the dangers of escaping from the real world to take cover 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 following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. 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 contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, 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 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 pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
