So why does Kathryn Bigelow’s apocalyptic thriller House of Dynamite feel so good?
Kathryn Bigelow's dynamite house It’s a thriller with a twisted structure: it’s a recurring nightmare. After taking us briskly through an apocalyptic scenario in which the highest levels of the U.S. government and military establishment are suddenly told that an intercontinental ballistic missile of unknown origin was launched over Chicago with less than 20 minutes to go before impact, much to their confusion, the film rewinds and replays the event from a slightly different perspective. We got a total of three versions of Defcon 1, each set in a different location and focused on a different set of characters. With each iteration, characters previously only glimpsed in passing or through video screens are fleshed out and become protagonists. That's not to say that the overall expansion had an impact on the trajectory of the missiles or the story. No matter who's watching the monitors, the data suggests things can't go anywhere but down.
dynamite house Noah Oppenheim, the former chairman of NBC News, is a controversial figure in his own right. He previously wrote the screenplay for Pablo Larrain's The Wretched Jackie There is also a focus on elaborate framing devices, perhaps because they allow him to display his ingenuity rather than the skilled focus of linear drama. Aside from its obvious, off-putting self-awareness, there's something effective about Oppenheim's setup dynamite house: The repetition of certain key lines not only helps orient us in the recursive chronological order, but also gives the words themselves a pre-programmed, spell-like quality, befitting a film filled with codes and ciphers. The most striking koan is the observation of a top general—a laconic warmonger played by acclaimed actor Tracy Letts, the reigning king of physical media—that history is being distorted in real time. “This isn't insanity,” he growled. “This is reality.”
Since 2009, reality—or at least rigorously researched, authentically textured, quasi-documentary naturalism—has been Bigelow's style. The Hurt Locker It won her the Academy Award for Best Director. Bigelow is credited with breaking the academy's glass ceiling, although the film itself arguably falls short of her best work. Bigelow's Great Early Films – A decade and a half better than 1981 Loveless person to 1995 strange days, peak between Breaking point (1991) – This former student of critical theory developed a truly stunning aesthetic sensibility, fusing muscular genre mechanics and feminist perspective with a glorious, unorthodox flair for visual abstraction. exist Breaking pointBigelow's widescreen thirst-trap opus eroticizes Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze while conveying their shared desire for spiritual transcendence—cleverly expressed through Bigelow's own obsession; wild poetic excess jeopardizes its reputation as a “good” movie, which is why it endures as a great movie. But although reconciliation is possible The Hurt Lockerof The film tells the story of American bomb disposal experts in Iraq, and in another of Bigelow's adrenaline-addicted fashions, its tone is melancholy rather than ecstatic, befitting a ripped-from-the-headlines subject matter and signaling Bigelow's ostensibly maturation into a serious, award-worthy director.
Predictably, there are more The Hurt Locker and their successors, zero dark thirty and Detroitexist dynamite house Compare Point breakthrough. Still, it’s telling that a passage reminiscent of the latter is the film’s best sequence. At the end of the first part, we cut away from the control room in Washington as the nuclear weapons are about to land, and we see a strange, disturbing commercial break featuring a handsome young man shirtless somewhere in the South Pacific. Rising from the waves against the beautiful horizon, he could be one of Bodhi's sun-basking ex-presidents. Instead, he's a bomber pilot tasked with delivering America's retaliatory payloads whenever the president decides to run with the proverbial nuclear football — heard but not seen via a black zoom camera in the first two parts, and finally embodied by Idris Elba in the final sprint.
We've only seen the lean, calm flyboy a handful of times in “Party.” dynamite house, But Bigelow's portrayal of him as a complete destroyer of worlds is truly fascinating and horrifying. He's young, stupid, and obedient to a chain of command that's only as strong as its weakest link.
strongest element dynamite house is the restless, relentless institutional buzz that Bigelow and her ace editor Kirk Baxter established as they crossed paths between tactical and ideological stances. Creating a trustworthy work environment and articulating ingrained protocols so that they feel natural takes a lot of skill. The sheer density of information spoken aloud or scrolling across monitors and iPhone screens represents some kind of achievement. Unfortunately, it serves a familiar and simple argument: The emissaries of the U.S. military-industrial complex are ultimately just ordinary people like you and me who will do their best to serve the greater good when faced with unimaginable crises. This egalitarian idea was exemplified in Sidney Lumet's 1964 play fail safe, from dynamite house borrows its basic setup and certain key plot points, as the material is presented as a square-jawed moral parable—a man with the audacity to humanize the Soviets on the other end of the hotline. Stanley Kubrick's film was released at about the same time Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bombswhose playful mirrors reflect Cold Warriors' lashing out at bodily fluids, present fail safeof A grim vision of mutually assured destruction unhip. But it still endures as a nerve-wracking classic, with Henry Fonda becoming JFK's symbolic doppelgänger.
Oppenheim takes a very different view of grace under pressure: as a store-stolen list of Sorkinisms West Wing. It's hard to take this kind of virtue signaling seriously given the state of affairs outside the framework. It turns out that a remake is being attempted fail safe in a Dr. Strangelove The world generates more cognitive dissonance than suspense. Watching Elba's commander-in-chief agonize over a choice that, as one level-headed subordinate puts it, essentially pits survival against suicide is harrowing, but it's also oddly comforting, as the character seems to have been transported from a dimension where Donald Trump doesn't exist. Although they have different opinions on the best course of action and the effectiveness of de-escalation, the characters here are (almost) all articulate and capable, and they're given some backstory that humanizes them and connects them to us. exist one battle after another, Sean Penn Strange love comic book style, casting Steven J. Lockjaw as the spiritual descendant of Sterling Hayden's Jack D. Ripper, filled with convulsive paranoia that his nemesis is a semen demon. Does Paul Thomas Anderson's stylized vision feel more like a film of the moment than Bigelow's meticulous, finished proceedings?
when zero dark thirty The book, which came out in 2012, was derided online by progressive critics who viewed its depictions of U.S. military torture as tantamount to endorsements and viewed its recreation of Operation Neptune Spear as a warning spectacle. The accusations are worth parsing—I think the film is misunderstood—but regardless, its most resonant (and disturbing) image is Jessica Chastain’s face in the final scene, her character standing in a giant bomber bay, tearful but resolute, the embodiment of post-9/11 American power, locked, loaded, and looking for a place to go. Chastain is also seen as something of a stand-in for her director—a mediator trying to reconcile her personal feelings about complex situations with her obvious project-management talents. There's also a Bigelow-esque character dynamite house Captain Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) is the competent but compassionate senior watch officer who presides over the opening sequence. As she's pushed aside by the film's structure, the material starts to feel oppressive – not something you want given the apocalyptic stakes.
Part of the problem is that the situation is inherently static, which prevents Bigelow from doing what she does best—dynamic, large-scale action sequences defined by weightless, rollercoaster motion. The handheld zoom and ominous musical score reek of high-end television. The other big problem is that Bigelow is imbued with a sardonic sense of humor—not ha-ha funny, but serious funny—that fuels A+B movies like close to darkness and blue steel, Despite all the tropes and clichés, it feels like the work of an artist. In addition to the aforementioned pilot floating in the ocean, poetic touches dynamite house While Ferguson clutches a plastic dinosaur given to her by her son (a symbol of the early days of extinction), a diplomat played by Greta Lee is trapped in a Gettysburg re-enactment so she must fight to make her voice heard in a Zoom meeting amid the clatter of Civil War-era musketry.
It stands to reason that these observations are little more than nitpicking in the shadow of Bigelow's larger goal, which is to sound a global alarm bell about nuclear proliferation. 1983 the day after tomorrow, The show was watched by 100 million people during prime time and was even shown on Soviet state television. Bigelow, who was born in 1951, talked about his upbringing in an interview. He received “dodge and cover” training from an early age. She hopes to examine this anxiety through a contemporary lens, which seems to come from an honest place. “I feel like nuclear weapons and the prospect of their use have become normalized,” she told deadline recent. “We don't think about it, we don't talk about it. It's an unthinkable situation. So, I'm hoping to maybe move it to the forefront of our lives.”
Of course, just because of the scope of the horror dynamite house Being incomprehensible doesn't mean the film is beyond criticism. In trying to fit her subject into the contours of a compelling dramatic narrative, Bigelow falls into a strange and somewhat pernicious form of American exceptionalism. The film is critical but essentially sympathetic; the script casts America as a reluctant nuclear power, which not only obscures its actual record but also narrows the film's focus to a subtle, ultimately solipsistic point. At the same time, the lack of larger geopolitical context, combined with a coy refusal to specify whether the missile was launched accidentally or as part of some larger, coordinated attack, undermines anything to be gained except raw, primal terror. As a result, Bigelow chose to eliminate any apocalyptic spectacle (like Lumet in fail safe) is not thought of as sophisticated restraint but as a heavy-handed evasion: the opposite of Christopher Nolan's sting. Oppenheimer, It travels through time and space, giving its namesake a terrifyingly prophetic moment. dynamite house On its own, it's engaging enough, but it doesn't add up to the sum of all its horrors, or even the nimbly moving parts of itself. In trying to explore the gap between madness and reality, Bigelow and her collaborators lapse into mediocrity.
Adam Nyman
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and writer in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: The Book That Really Ties the Movie Together is on sale now from Abrams.