A House of Dynamite: A Political Fantasy and Major Disappointment.
Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a warning tale about the perils of abandoning reality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform 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, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to 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 set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer expires.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the very second the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
