Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A notable instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those top leaders (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 two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, every iteration adding on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets 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 evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story assumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
