Kathryn Bigelow made history in 2010 with The Hurt Locker, becoming the first female filmmaker to ever win the best director award at the Oscars. Her resume before and after are similarly filled with incredible work, whether that be the iconic vampire film Near Dark, the extremely cool Strange Days, or her post-Oscar efforts Zero Dark Thirty and Detroit. It's been almost a decade since Detroit, so I was very excited to see Bigelow back on the big screen. Sadly A House of Dynamite was a big mixed bag for me, offering a lot of promise but failing to deliver.
The film follows a seemingly normal day in the white house until an unattributed missile is found heading straight for the central United States. We are thus thrown into the fire as numerous different branches of the government and military work to stop the missile and ready themselves for the next steps if they are unable to.
The central plot of the film really unfolds over the course of twenty minutes. There are scenes before that time frame, but once the missile is made known a 20-minutes to impact timer starts counting down. Bigelow and writing Noah Oppenheim take a kind of Rashomon approach, telling the story through the different viewpoints of specific parties. It's a storytelling style I tend to really enjoy, especially in something like Weapons from earlier this year. Sadly the way it is handled just doesn't work for this story. We get a thrilling 40ish minutes that I loved, then the film cuts to black and takes us back to the beginning. I think the biggest problem is that the entire story winds up being told three times, each with different characters at the focus, so we learn little to no new information each time and each time we know exactly where the film is going.
The cast is huge and full of familiar faces. Stars like Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, and Jason Clarke are all great. Alongside them are countless character actors like Jared Harris and Gabriel Basso, as well as up and comers like Jonah Hauer-King (The Little Mermaid), Moses Ingram (Obi-wan Kenobi), Greta Lee (Past Lives), Willa Fitzgerald (Strange Darling/ The Fall of the House of Usher), and Kyle Allen (The Lift List). We also get to see one of my favourites Kaitlyn Dever, although she is extremely underused. Sadly underused is a key theme, as with a cast this huge hardly anyone gets any time to shine. The performances are all strong, but we get to know next to nothing about any character and most of them wind up completely vanishing from the film.
For a film steeped in the military and government, Bigelow brings a shockingly apolitical approach to everything here. That's not something I usually care about, but it feels strange in the context of this story. More upsetting to me is how unsatisfying the film is. Nothing is wrapped up in any meaningful way, we don't get to see where any characters wind up so we ultimately just end up watching a short period of actions occur, sometimes watching pieces of it multiple times to focus on different people. I was hooked by the tension early on, and the sound design is some of the year's best, but it starts to get annoying rehashing the exact same things.
The filmmaking is really strong, along with the great sound design the cinematography is strong and there's no bad performance. Sadly it just isn't assembled well whatsoever, turning something exciting into a final product that teases constantly with great tension that ultimately goes nowhere. Sadly one of the bigger disappointments of the year for me. 2.5/5
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