Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker 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 prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A notable example has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a missile crisis drama 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, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer expires.
The answer – 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’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
