Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A notable instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a warning tale about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, 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 – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
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 unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration adding on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority 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 previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
