Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable example has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a warning tale about the risks of escaping from the real world to find refuge 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 compelled to respond to external pressures. 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 long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for 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 effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock expires.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each repetition trowelling on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Earlier 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 definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; 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.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
