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 act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel compelled to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile example has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why 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 sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of 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 native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a missile crisis drama 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 by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer hits zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, every iteration layering on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, 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 exact moment the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared 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 fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so once more it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this script takes for granted 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 an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
