Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the perils of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept 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 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock expires.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, every iteration adding on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
