Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, film scholars may feel compelled to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such titles can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand 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: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the timer hits zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works 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 exact moment the film fades to black. The personas 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 pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, 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 atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; stiffening and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable 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, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
