Bestowed upon a privileged handful, 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 prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such accolades can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the simulated environment. (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 reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate 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 service would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, 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 repetition trowelling on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
