Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, 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 commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of 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 native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the chronometer hits zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – 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 prologue briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each repetition layering on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
