Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A notable example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (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 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 alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the chronometer expires.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each pass trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her best films 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 drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger 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 moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
