A House of Dynamite: An Ambitious Political Thriller and Major Disappointment.
Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur 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 pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A notable test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run 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. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – 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 summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (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 missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the chronometer expires.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration layering on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with 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 dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
