Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel obliged to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable instance 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 indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. 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 fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept 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 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the chronometer reaches zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence 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 extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, every iteration trowelling on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the negative impact Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her bold choices, 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 nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
