The Film A House of Dynamite: A Political Fantasy and Significant Letdown.

Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent instance has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter 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 after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned 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: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the chronometer expires.

The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each repetition trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her most successful works 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 very second the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.