The Film A House of Dynamite: An Ambitious Political Thriller and Major Disappointment.

Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel compelled to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.

It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer reaches zero.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each pass adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits 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 balancing visual flair.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; stiffening and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core 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 intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.