Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the digital world. (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 fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed 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.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
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 region by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those top leaders (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 lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, every iteration adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
