Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable 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 lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the negative impact platform financing has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes 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 previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
