Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title 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 prism, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each repetition trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her best films 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 narrative captivates at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact Netflix money has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
