Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to justify even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on 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 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 director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer expires.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, every iteration trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the negative impact platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that beginning part as perhaps an additional of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
