Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such titles can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. 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 deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer hits zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the perspectives 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 lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky 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 artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
