Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A high-profile example has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, influenced 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 simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the chronometer reaches zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
