The Film A House of Dynamite: An Ambitious Political Thriller and Major Disappointment.

Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A notable test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to seek shelter 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 fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached 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 extended past of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her finest achievements 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 drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so once more it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.