Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such titles can restrict a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A notable example has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the perils of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. 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 deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer hits zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each pass adding on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the negative impact platform financing has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so once more it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than 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 the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
