Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director 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 least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A notable test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the dangers 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 after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama 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, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the countdown clock expires.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, every iteration adding on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, up to and including 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 potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve 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 curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
