Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such titles can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems nailed on for only one honor 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 established her acclaim with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the timer hits zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each repetition layering on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
