Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements 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 artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama 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, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each pass trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, 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, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
