Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker 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 perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A high-profile instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to reflect on the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
