Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation 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 celebrated director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the chronometer reaches zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives 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. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, every iteration adding on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the harmful influence platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content 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, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so once more it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
