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

Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the perils of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (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 homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.

You can understand why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept 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 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.

The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each pass adding on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous 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 definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to ponder the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.