Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable example has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, 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 summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; 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 story becomes engaging at the very second the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, 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 intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
