Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such titles can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A notable instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of rejecting actuality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (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 missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.
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 prologue briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works 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 story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to rein in 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 potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.