Bestowed upon a select group, the designation 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, auteurist critics may feel obliged to justify even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. 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 contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the very second the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
