🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed 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 film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama 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 strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent 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 moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.