Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle 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 prism, cinema analysts may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A prominent instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the negative impact Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, 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 deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
