Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a moral story about the perils of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the chronometer expires.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, every iteration adding on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements 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 drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to ponder the negative impact platform financing has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, 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 scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
