Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A high-profile example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the dangers of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: the heart of 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 feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
