🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements 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.

You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock expires.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, every iteration layering on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the very second the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the negative impact platform financing has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.