Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of abandoning reality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of 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 homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the timer expires.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
