Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, 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 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 – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the timer reaches zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (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 lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each repetition trowelling on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the very second 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 situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
