Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their poorest 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 downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed 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 long history of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like 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 presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the timer reaches zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each repetition adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; stiffening and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections 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 dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
