Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge 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 native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each pass trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” 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 ample time to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story takes for granted 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 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 newer films to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
