🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile instance 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 honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller 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 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.

It's easy to see why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a projectile fired 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 destination: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer reaches zero.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.