Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to defend 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 jobbing hack.) One downside is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to 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 fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate 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 ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the timer reaches zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. 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 definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the very second the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
