Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A prominent test case 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 destined for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each repetition layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event 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 plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
