Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively 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 minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a moral story about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer 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 addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate 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 previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer hits zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, every iteration adding on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the negative impact platform financing has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat 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 earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
