A House of Dynamite: A Political Fantasy and Major Disappointment.
Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Esteemed Director can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled 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 superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a moral story about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time 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 alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, 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 repetition trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the harmful influence platform financing has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
