Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile 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 nailed on for only one recognition 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 versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, 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 extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker 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 effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
