Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such titles can restrict a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A prominent example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of 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 reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer hits zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each pass adding on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Previous 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 fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director 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 group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
