Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such titles can restrict a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment 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 group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
