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

Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to defend even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.

You can understand why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties 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 destination: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the harmful influence platform financing has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.