Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel compelled to justify even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer 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 broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration trowelling on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; 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 concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
