Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A high-profile instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also served as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock expires.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, every iteration layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Previous 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 final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye 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 Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat 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 earliest of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
