Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title 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 prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. 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 deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
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 United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer expires.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the negative impact platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
