Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel compelled to justify even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such titles can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A notable example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller 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 future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – 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 heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer expires.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each repetition trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence platform financing has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this story assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
