Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover 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 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 addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (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 spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each pass adding on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the very second the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
