Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A high-profile example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. 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 action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the chronometer expires.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each repetition adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
