Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic 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 intense sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote 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 pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each repetition layering on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment 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 distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the harmful influence platform financing has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to rein in 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 artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay assumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
