Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A high-profile instance has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the countdown clock expires.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each repetition adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; 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 endgame; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
