Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A prominent example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a moral story about the dangers of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go 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’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass layering on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 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 in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
