Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such titles can restrict a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance 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 measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a moral story about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. 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 fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the countdown clock hits zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: 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 edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence platform financing has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, 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 previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
