Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such titles can limit a creative to a tight creative box, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any measure – seems nailed on for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the countdown clock expires.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each repetition trowelling on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier 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 fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve plenty of opportunity to ponder the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
