Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel pressured to justify even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has failed to impress, 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 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 creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock expires.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, 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 ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as perhaps an additional 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 passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
