Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a warning tale about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (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 standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring 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?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer hits zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each pass trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
