Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can confine a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – 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 period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, every iteration adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
