🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur 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, seeking out material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a moral story about the perils of escaping from the real world to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 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 contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer expires.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each repetition adding on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as perhaps an additional 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 pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.