Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A high-profile example has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside 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.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
