🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such titles can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent example has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama 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 electrifying future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive 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 award season success. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer reaches zero.

The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each pass adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger 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 earliest of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between 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 is detected, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.