Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A high-profile instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband 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 then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film 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 most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer expires.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each pass trowelling on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the negative impact platform financing has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so once more it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
