Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A prominent 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 destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a warning tale about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, 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 contentious dialogue 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 scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer expires.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime 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 edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – 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 appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
