The noble intentions behind Kathryn Bigelow’s biggest flop: “Who are the good guys?”
It’s probably unlikely that anyone has asked Google: “Which is the director with the most films that will make me unbearably tense while watching them?”, but if anyone has, then the answer that would have come back is undoubtedly Kathryn Bigelow. You only need to have watched, at best, one of her films to know this.
And if that film happens to be The Hurt Locker, the 2008 Iraq war drama that was the first ever ‘Best Picture’ winner at the Oscars to have been directed by a woman, then you’ll know exactly what we’re talking about. That film, starring Jeremy Renner, follows a bomb disposal team as they battle ordnance left by insurgents while under attack, and it is absolutely exhausting to put it mildly.
The movie only lasts two hours but it feels like about six (in a good way) as you tremble and sweat and hide behind your fingers and/or your sofa praying that Renner will cut the right wire while listening to raised heartbeats and heavy breathing in stereo. It understandably won six Academy Awards, but it’s still the type of film you’re probably only going to watch once, unless you’re a complete masochist.
Of course it isn’t the only time Bigelow has pulled this trick; just four years later she decided we hadn’t suffered enough and put us in the heart of the unit tasked with tracking down and taking out Osama Bin Laden in the Jessica Chastain-starring Zero Dark Thirty, again a lesson in “oh my god what’s going to happen” jumpiness that put you squarely in the point of view of someone possibly about to die at any minute.
But then Bigelow has a long history of extracting the most amount of drama out of any film she directs, often relying on a military story background and leaning into the existing conflict that allows for it. Her latest film for Netflix goes entirely down that route, and if you fancy some high stakes with your elevated pulse rate, then how does the possible complete elimination of all mankind thanks to a nuclear war grab you?
That’s the plot of A House of Dynamite, which sees Idris Elba’s finger hovering over the button as the President of the United States, amidst all-out global turmoil, as a panicked Rebecca Ferguson storms around a situation room desperately trying to get world leaders to calm the fuck down. Typically breezy Bigelow fare then, essentially.
But the director, now 73, is unlikely to care about how much she’s shredding the nerves of streaming audiences, given she already delivered a movie with a similar feel with Harrison Ford’s K19: The Widowmaker back in 2002.
That movie was a submarine drama set in the early 1960s that was expected to be a big hit, but rather like the subject matter, instead sank without a trace at the box office. Despite the pairing of Ford and Liam Neeson, Bigelow’s effort just didn’t connect with moviegoers who were perhaps suffering from tense Harrison Ford overload, given he’d only just come off the back of a decade of Tom Clancy efforts like Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger.
But as Bigelow told Time, she had high hopes the film would do something different than standard action flicks, saying: “I wanted to dispense with all the movie tropes — the clean through line, the idea of the hero. It was interesting trying to get that one financed, because you’d be pitching it, saying, ‘This really happened. They averted a thermonuclear event off the coast of a NATO base.’ I remember sitting in some executive’s office, and they said, ‘O.K., but who are the good guys?’ ‘What do you mean? The Russians are the good guys.’ ‘No, I mean, who are the Americans?’”
Maybe, along with Harrison’s Russian accent, that kind of confusion was behind the film failing at cinemas, bringing in almost half its budget and getting decidedly mixed reviews. Luckily, Bigelow is having no such problems with A House of Dynamite, which hits Netflix on October 24th.
