Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation 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 lens, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a moral story about the perils of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be interested in 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 platform would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the timer hits zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each repetition layering on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
