Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable 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 assured of only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer reaches zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the very second the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so once more it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
