🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such titles can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping 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 broached 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 deep-seated legacy of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer expires.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence platform financing has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so once more it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part 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 first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.