Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A high-profile instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the perils of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer 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?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the countdown clock hits zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between 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 is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
