Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; 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 Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a moral story about the dangers of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive 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 the United States – was forced on the defensive. 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.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
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 Ocean by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer reaches zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence 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 lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each pass layering on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the very second the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
