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 ennobled director through this prism, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of escaping from the real world to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements 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 – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept 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 brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each repetition trowelling on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her most successful works 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 story becomes engaging at the very second the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the negative impact platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The passion 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.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior 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 afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
