Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A notable example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter 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 determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the perils of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 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 broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer hits zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: 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 prologue only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
