🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable instance has recently arrived on 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 recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed 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 deep-seated legacy of racism.

It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.