Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The logic 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 titles can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of rejecting actuality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. 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 contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer 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?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the timer expires.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition layering on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
