Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director 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 lens, cinema analysts may feel obliged to defend even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: downtown 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 two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock hits zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous 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 a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
