Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A high-profile instance 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 guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts 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.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written 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 missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. 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 adding on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, 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 grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and practically fossilising 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 trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
