Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A high-profile example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory 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 streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: 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. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, every iteration layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the very second the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this story takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the earliest 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 lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
