Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) 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 dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the perils of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts 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.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the countdown clock expires.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, every iteration adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; 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 endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so once more it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
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 deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
