Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A prominent example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of rejecting actuality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the chronometer expires.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each pass layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant 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 cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist 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 tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior 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 afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.