Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to justify even their poorest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A notable example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the countdown clock expires.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, 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 exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence platform financing has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to rein in her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
