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

Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts 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 interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.

The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, every iteration adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced 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 passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, 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 deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.