A House of Dynamite: A Political Fantasy and Major Disappointment.

Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A notable example has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory 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 streamer would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept 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 rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the negative impact Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 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 Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes 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 prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.