A House of Dynamite: An Ambitious Political Thriller and Significant Letdown.

Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the risks of rejecting actuality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.

You can understand why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the timer expires.

The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, 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 layering on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.

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 streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.