Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama 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 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of escaping from the real world to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer expires.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; 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 concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the harmful influence platform financing has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so yet again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, 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 anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
