Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable example has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick 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 electrifying sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a moral story about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned 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 award season success. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension 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 a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
