Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A prominent instance 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 measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to take cover 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 the United States – was forced on the defensive. 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 heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer hits zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, deeply responsible 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 latest projects to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
