Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite: An Ambitious Political Thriller and Major Disappointment.

Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel pressured to justify even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama 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 sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the digital world. (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 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 period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.

One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer hits zero.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each repetition layering on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her best films 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 precise instant the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the harmful influence platform financing has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.