Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile 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 measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive 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 the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer hits zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
