Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable test case has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort 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 underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the risks of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, 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 interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (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 Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the timer hits zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, every iteration adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The passion 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 curb her bold choices, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
