Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such titles can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the timer hits zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the harmful influence platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, 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 beginning part as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat 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 time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.