Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such titles can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a warning tale about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each repetition trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
