Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such titles can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A high-profile instance has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written 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 atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
