Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite: An Ambitious Political Thriller and Significant Letdown.

Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Examining Bigelow's Career Path

To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.

One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the chronometer reaches zero.

The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each repetition trowelling on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works 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 narrative captivates at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment

The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.