Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate 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 wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer hits zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those holding roles of command 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 earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
