Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A high-profile example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each pass trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so yet again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
