Fewer than 24 hours after its rave-fueled Venice premiere, Netflix has at last dropped the trailer for Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite.”
What do you think? Does it grab you?
Honestly, after yesterday’s morning screening in Venice, most of us expected “A House of Dynamite” to land with only polite applause. I spoke with plenty of people afterward, and enthusiasm was scarce. A quick glance at the early Letterboxd ratings only reinforced the sense that Bigelow’s latest was in for a rough ride.
And yet, a few hours later, the embargo lifts—and suddenly the film is swimming in raves. Go figure. My hunch is the praise won’t be totally unanimous for long. As the film rolls out, expect to hear the common refrain that the opening half hour is its strongest stretch, and that the “Rashomon”-style repetition in Bigelow’s structure wears thin and repetitive.
I liked it well enough, though it plays as a fairly standard political thriller. No performance or actor really stands out, and no single shot lingers in the mind, even if the craft is solid throughout. It’s the kind of film I’d rather revisit outside the festival setting before settling on a stronger opinion.
“A House of Dynamite,” Bigelow’s first movie in eight years, stars Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Jared Harris, Jason Clarke: they’re the players on the board, but the real star is the faceless villain—a rogue nuclear missile streaking toward Chicago, giving us a twenty-minute deadline to doosmday.
The movie is sliced into three movements, each about half an hour, each told from a different set of eyes, and each ending with the same cliffhanger. The script, by Noah Oppenheim (who brilliantly wrote “Jackie” but also conceived Netflix’s dreadful “Zero Day”), isn’t one for subtlety. There’s no denying the research, the detail, the acronyms that get thrown into ‘Dynamite.’ It’s a film that attempts to be as realistic and grounded as possible about the situation at hand.
“A House of Dynamite” will open in theaters on October 10 and arrive on Netflix on October 24.