Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to defend even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A prominent test case 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 guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements 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 drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned 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 strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each repetition adding on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat 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 time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
