Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic 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 sci-fi suspense story, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-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 contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean 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: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each pass layering on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than 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 neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
