🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, film scholars may feel compelled to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, 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 period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer expires.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass layering on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.