Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such titles can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A notable instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the chronometer expires.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each repetition adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the very second the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, extending to 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 strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director 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 effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
