Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, film scholars may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable test case 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 indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – 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 summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert 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: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the timer expires.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact Netflix money has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 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 fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so once more it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed 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 largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
