🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle 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 justify even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable example has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures 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.

You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)

What Works and What Doesn't

Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean 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 objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer hits zero.

The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each repetition trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to reflect on the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.

Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts

The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.