Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is all the greater. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass adding on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip 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 triggering event is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to ponder the negative impact platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, 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 director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
