Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such titles can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the perils of escaping from the real world to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, 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 timer reaches zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each repetition adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay assumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
