Bestowed upon a select group, the designation 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, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such titles can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A notable instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama 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 electrifying near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale 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 following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the negative impact Netflix money has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, 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 beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
