A House of Dynamite: A Political Fantasy and Significant Letdown.

Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements 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.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, 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 fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, 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 multiple times, every iteration adding on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end 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 earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.