Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. 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 long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the timer hits zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each repetition trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
