Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel obliged to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A prominent example has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled 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 deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to 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 streamer would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock hits zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the negative impact platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
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 deemed insufficient; tensing up and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
