Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest 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 downside is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a moral story about the risks of rejecting actuality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the countdown clock hits zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the negative impact platform financing has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger 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 era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
