Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent test case has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. 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 contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch 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 brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer hits zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, 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 multiple times, every iteration layering on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so once more it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
