Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller 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 intense future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted 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: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the harmful influence platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; stiffening and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
