Bestowed upon an elite few, 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 celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A prominent example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the risks of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. 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 contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the timer reaches zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this talky 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; stiffening and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
