Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A notable test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick 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 more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation 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 – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer hits zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, every iteration adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her most successful works 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 drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched 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 stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist 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 effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat 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 time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
