Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel pressured to justify even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance has recently arrived on 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 assured of only one honor 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 established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama 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 sci-fi suspense story, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – 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 time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer hits zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this story assumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
