Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation 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 justify even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such titles can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller 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 strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the chronometer expires.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. 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 again and again, every iteration adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
