Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A notable instance has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama 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 the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the dangers of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – 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 summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock expires.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger 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 era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
