Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable instance has just reached 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 measure – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie 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 finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, 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 fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
