Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel obliged to defend even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, 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 contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand 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 new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration layering on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork 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 potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to 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 box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay assumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
