Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title 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 perspective, cinema analysts may feel compelled to justify even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A notable instance has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a moral story about the perils of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy 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 scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, every iteration layering on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist 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 tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s left to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
