Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel obliged to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A prominent instance has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film 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 most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer expires.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. 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 pass trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the harmful influence platform financing has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
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 progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
