Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A prominent example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems assured of only one honor 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 earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
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 by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the timer expires.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each repetition layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior 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 oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
