Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A notable example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama 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 intense future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of abandoning reality 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 after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed 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 film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer expires.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints 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. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each repetition layering on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core 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 fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – 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 describes has been destroyed utterly.
