Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Noted Film-maker 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 prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such titles can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one honor 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 expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the countdown clock hits zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each pass layering on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer 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 fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy 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 director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
