🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

You can understand why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the timer expires.

The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the visual style 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 recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.