The Film A House of Dynamite: A Political Fantasy and Major Disappointment.
Bestowed upon a select group, the designation 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 celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the perils of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
