Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to defend even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
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 series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a warning tale about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (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 standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each repetition trowelling on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this story presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
