Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a moral story about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – 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 heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted 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 pitch 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 brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the timer expires.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each pass 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 finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script assumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
