Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent instance has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of 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 stray rocket first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
