A House of Dynamite: An Ambitious Political Thriller and Major Disappointment.
Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such titles can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable instance 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 guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller 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 projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer expires.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, 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 precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the big 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 recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
