Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer expires.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition trowelling on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the very second the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
