Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such titles can restrict a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A prominent example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary 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 extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each pass layering on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, 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 passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first 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 behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
