Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of rejecting actuality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration layering on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
