Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such titles can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A notable example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
