Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the perils of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of 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 forced on the defensive. 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 heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate 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 enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each pass layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the very second the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the harmful influence platform financing has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
