Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of 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 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 contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller 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 compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer hits zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so once more it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
