Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a moral story about the dangers of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, every iteration layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
