Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite: An Ambitious Political Thriller and Major Disappointment.

Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to defend even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent example has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Retracing the Director's Steps

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the timer hits zero.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each pass trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws

While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, 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 qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.