Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel compelled to make excuses for 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 accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material suitable for a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession 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. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a moral story about the perils of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer 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 tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her most successful works 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 concluding action; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the negative impact platform financing has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
