Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite: A Political Fantasy and Significant Letdown.

Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of escaping from the real world to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.

It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly go once the chronometer expires.

The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, every iteration trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Earlier 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 catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so yet again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects 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 America Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.