Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, 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 fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. 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 curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
