Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle 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 celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such titles can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of abandoning reality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to 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 native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration layering on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
