Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A prominent example 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 destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, 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 summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration adding on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the negative impact Netflix money has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
