Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such titles can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent example has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
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 by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the chronometer expires.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
