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 provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such titles can restrict a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. 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 fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the timer expires.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the very second the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
