Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 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 then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back 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, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each pass layering on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, 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 concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, 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 understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
