Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent example 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 destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to seek shelter 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 after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration layering on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even 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 resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script assumes 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 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 afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
