Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable test case has made its way to 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 destined for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping 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 contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, traveling to 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 made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the countdown clock expires.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so once more it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.