Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a moral story about the perils of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the countdown clock expires.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition adding on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
