🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed 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 extended past of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence platform financing has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.