Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile instance has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a moral story about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea 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 brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the timer hits zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each pass layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her best films as a Esteemed Director, 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 very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat 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 initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
