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

Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A notable test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each repetition trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, 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 deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.