Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A high-profile example has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production 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’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; 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.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
