A House of Dynamite: An Ambitious Political Thriller and Significant Letdown.
Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable instance has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. 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 long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock expires.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each pass layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script assumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
