Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined 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 failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock expires.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, 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, sketched in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
