Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story 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 intense future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see 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 platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer hits zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; 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.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to reflect on the negative impact Netflix money has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
