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 ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such titles can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is all the greater. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a moral story about the perils of rejecting actuality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, 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 period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the timer hits zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her best films as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core 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 time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
