Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation 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 celebrated director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent example 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 measure – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 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 then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News 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 Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, every iteration adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold 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 endgame; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the negative impact platform financing has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly 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 portrays has been destroyed utterly.
