A House of Dynamite: A Political Fantasy and Significant Letdown.
Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel compelled to justify even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such titles can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A notable instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her best films 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 ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s understandable 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, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
