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

Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A notable test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined for 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 established her acclaim with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.

You can understand why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so once more it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script assumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk 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 moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.