Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. 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 make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such accolades can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A prominent example has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, 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 summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: 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 full-length production can possibly head once the countdown clock hits zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each repetition layering on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: 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 yet again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
