Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the risks of escaping from the real world to take cover in the simulated environment. (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 reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, 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 attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea 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 rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the chronometer expires.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the negative impact platform financing has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
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 unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
