Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A high-profile instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
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 run of expansive, limber genre pics: 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 creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on 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 addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the timer reaches zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction 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 revisit that first reel again and again, every iteration layering on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier 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 fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters 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 sufficient moments to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money 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 recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
