Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful 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 titles can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A prominent instance 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 indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a moral story about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea 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 short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the timer expires.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration layering on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
