Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such titles can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, 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 timer hits zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the negative impact platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
