Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel compelled to justify even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also served as a warning tale about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. 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.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary 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 a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content 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 potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script assumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
