Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, 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 commercial director.) One drawback is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A prominent test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of escaping from the real world to seek shelter 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 post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the chronometer expires.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, 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 intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
