A House of Dynamite: A Political Fantasy and Major Disappointment.
Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster 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 very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a moral story about the perils of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each pass trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, 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 Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
