Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A prominent example has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to 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 the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
