Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite: An Ambitious Political Thriller and Significant Letdown.

Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, film scholars may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster 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 very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent example has just reached 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 nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer expires.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging 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 spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.