Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless 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, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the timer hits zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, 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 repeatedly, each repetition trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold 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 triggering event is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to curb her risk-taking, 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 atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
