Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is all the greater. A prominent test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
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 expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock expires.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, every iteration trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the very second the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, 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 skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
