The Film A House of Dynamite: A Political Fantasy and Major Disappointment.
Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
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 broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be drawn towards 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 vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass layering on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, 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 ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to reflect on the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story takes for granted is that those holding roles of command 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 prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
