Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such titles can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile example has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements 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 director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer hits zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, every iteration adding on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
