A House of Dynamite: An Ambitious Political Thriller and Significant Letdown.

Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, film scholars may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A high-profile example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.

You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control 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 very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, extending to 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 perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat 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 time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.