Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle 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 ennobled director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel obliged to justify even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A notable example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – 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 summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each repetition layering on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, extending to 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 cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
