Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to defend even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A high-profile example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession 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 overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the dangers of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (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 fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in 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 strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the chronometer reaches zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, 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 multiple times, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
