Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A notable instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the perils of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – 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 heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, every iteration adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
