A House of Dynamite: A Political Fantasy and Major Disappointment.
Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Noted Film-maker can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent test case has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick 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 direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, 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 period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces 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 target: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the chronometer 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 top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each pass layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; 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 endgame; the narrative captivates at the very second the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
