Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation 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 ennobled director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel obliged to justify even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A high-profile test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – 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 period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
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 rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, 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, every iteration adding on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her best films as a Esteemed Director, 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 precise instant the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this story takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
