Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A high-profile example has recently arrived on 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 award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a moral story about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each pass layering on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
