Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such titles can limit a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; 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 underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – 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 fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (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 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 presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer expires.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each pass adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, 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 director felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, 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 trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
