Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of 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 native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer 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’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, every iteration adding on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
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 deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
