Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director 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 perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to justify even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched 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, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each repetition layering on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose 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 almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken 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 previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
