Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the dangers of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip 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 triggering event is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the very second 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 cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the negative impact Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, 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, sketched in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger 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 era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
