Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A notable test case has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – 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 look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the dangers of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
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 projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is spotted on the radars 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 opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer expires.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film ends. The figures 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 doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end 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 somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
