Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. 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 feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the perils of escaping from the real world to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (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, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period 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 flagged to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact platform financing has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming 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 disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, clocks off early, so again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this script 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 the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
