Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept 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 short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the chronometer reaches zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene 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 revisit that first reel multiple times, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay assumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
