Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable 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 indication – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of escaping from the real world to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. 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 fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the chronometer hits zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, every iteration layering on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
