Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel compelled to defend even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such titles can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable example has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels 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. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-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 heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the timer hits zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the negative impact platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
