Bestowed upon a select group, the title 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 lens, cinema analysts may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent test case has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to take cover 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 after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
