Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such accolades can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer hits zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints 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. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, 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 characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, 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 initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
