Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, film scholars may feel compelled to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one award 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 earned her laurels with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures 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.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly go once the chronometer expires.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each pass layering on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
