The Film A House of Dynamite: A Political Fantasy and Significant Letdown.
Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution 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 risks of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing 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 tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties 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 objective: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer hits zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each pass adding on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; stiffening and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
