Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a tight creative box, 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 minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unidentified actors is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer hits zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Previous 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 inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
