Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker 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 distinguished director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, 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 summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each repetition layering on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, 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 Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected 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, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
