Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A notable test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller 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 effective early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock expires.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each pass layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the earliest 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 not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
