Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a warning tale about the risks of rejecting actuality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements 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.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the timer expires.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer 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 endgame; the narrative captivates at the very second the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier 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 oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
