Bestowed upon a select group, the designation 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 ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter 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 post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
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 unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a American military installation 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 rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass layering on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist 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 yet again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
