Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite: A Political Fantasy and Significant Letdown.
Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such titles can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A prominent example has just reached 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 indication – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
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 succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the perils of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (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 brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the chronometer reaches zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each repetition layering on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her most successful works 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 very second the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions 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 previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
