Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A prominent test case has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, 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 summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer reaches zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each pass adding on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
