Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such titles can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A notable test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge 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 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 then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the negative impact platform financing has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
