Bestowed upon an elite few, 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 distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A prominent example has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – 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 earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be attracted to 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 enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the chronometer reaches zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, every iteration trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
