Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel obliged to defend 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 drawback is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the dangers of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the chronometer expires.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior 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 endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to reflect on the negative impact platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
