Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel obliged to justify even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly go 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 angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist 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, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk 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 initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
