Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Noted Film-maker 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 perspective, film scholars may feel compelled to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; 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 film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover 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 fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time 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 presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the timer hits zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. 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 different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
