Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A notable instance has made its way to 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 assured of only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama 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 underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. 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 deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer reaches zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration adding on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as 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 Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier 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 neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
