Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass adding on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the very second the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so once more it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion 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 risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
