Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such titles can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent example has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a moral story about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
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 unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each pass layering on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
