Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to defend even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past 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 penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer reaches zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each pass layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Esteemed Director, 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 concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
