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

Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel obliged to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can confine a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent example has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.

The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. 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 revisit that first reel multiple times, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the negative impact Netflix money has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; stiffening and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.