Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A high-profile instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the chronometer reaches zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each repetition layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her finest achievements 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 final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so once more it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
