Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to justify even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer expires.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each pass adding on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold 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 drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, 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, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
