Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic 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 incident, which also served as a warning tale about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to 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 homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory 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 streamer would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes 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 objective: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, 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 considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
