Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, film scholars may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic 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 honorifics can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A notable example has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow 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 Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a moral story about the perils of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
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 by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, en route towards 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 two-hour film can possibly go once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, 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 extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film concludes. 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 bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to reflect on the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so once more it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist 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 dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, deeply responsible 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 intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
