Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such titles can confine a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A high-profile instance has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama 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 underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation 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 – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (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, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each repetition layering on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. 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 inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
