Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A prominent instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama 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 more definite sign of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
