A House of Dynamite: A Political Fantasy and Major Disappointment.

Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: 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 artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – 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 time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.

You can understand why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.

The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, every iteration adding on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip 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 triggering event is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.