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 act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable instance has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems assured of only one award 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 earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the dangers of rejecting actuality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer expires.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
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 unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
