Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the chronometer reaches zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each pass trowelling on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the harmful influence platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay assumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
