Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick 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, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – 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 director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass layering on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
