Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle 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 celebrated director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to justify even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A notable instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the timer hits zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each pass trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control 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 exact moment the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
