Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, 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 attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert 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 most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the countdown clock expires.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 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 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 resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script assumes 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 end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest 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 devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
