Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A notable instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. 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 fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer reaches zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each repetition trowelling on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; 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 final play; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so once more it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
