Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A notable example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to take cover 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 standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the timer reaches zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each repetition layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements 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 that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 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 latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
