A House of Dynamite: An Ambitious Political Thriller and Significant Letdown.
Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has made its way to 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 recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards 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 platform would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
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 US army base in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock hits zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each repetition trowelling on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
