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 act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to justify 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 commercial director.) One downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of 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 underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring 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, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. 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 film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote 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?)
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 missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer reaches zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, 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 cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
