Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such titles can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A notable instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer hits zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; 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 story becomes engaging at the very second the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the harmful influence platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
