Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping 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 addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each repetition adding on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
