Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle 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 lens, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their least successful efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. 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 contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the chronometer expires.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each repetition adding on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 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 fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy 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 talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, conscientious to the core 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 deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
