Bestowed upon an elite few, 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 perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband 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 forced on the defensive. 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 long history of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each pass trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Prior 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 fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent 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 fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
