Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such titles can limit a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals 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 look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: biker flick 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 overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the dangers of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. 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 heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes 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 alerted to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its destination: central 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 two-hour film can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each repetition layering on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a artist's anxiety of being thought unworthy; stiffening and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
