Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such titles can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable example has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures 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.
You can understand why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (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 brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the timer expires.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each pass adding on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so once more it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
