Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite: An Ambitious Political Thriller and Major Disappointment.

Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed 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.

You can understand why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent 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 destination: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock hits zero.

The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each pass layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.