Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see 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 latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the chronometer reaches zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each pass trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
