Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama 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 intense near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the countdown clock hits zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
