Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A prominent instance has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring 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 moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film 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 strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock expires.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each repetition layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the negative impact Netflix money has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so yet again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond 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 the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
