Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director 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 perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A high-profile instance has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: 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 the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. 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 film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation 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 left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration layering on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her most successful works 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 concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, 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 collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
