Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such titles can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on 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 recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (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 short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the timer expires.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
