The Film A House of Dynamite: A Political Fantasy and Significant Letdown.
Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, film scholars may feel obliged to make excuses for 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 jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent instance has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. 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 sharper insight of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of rejecting actuality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the countdown clock hits zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief 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 revisit that first reel multiple times, every iteration adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
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 visual style of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
