Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such accolades can limit a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable example has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic 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, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer hits zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president 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 a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each pass layering on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier 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 triggering event is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the harmful influence platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so once more it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
