🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such accolades can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama 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 creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached 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 deep-seated legacy of racism.

It's easy to see why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)

High Points and Low Points

Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.

The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, 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 fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.

Visual and Thematic Shortcomings

While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another 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 stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.

The Core Fear and Final Analysis

The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this script assumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.