Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent instance has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems assured of only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a succession of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the perils of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing 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 then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring 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: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the executive briefing area, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part 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 prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
