Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics 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 doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable instance has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the risks of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer reaches 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’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. 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 multiple times, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the very second the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
