Bestowed upon a select group, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is all the greater. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: 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 overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge 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 native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. 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 contentious dialogue 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 – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (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, portraying in a realistic timeframe the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.
The answer – and this is where the letdowns start – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each repetition layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control 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 narrative captivates at the precise instant the film fades to black. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to consider the harmful influence platform financing has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow brought to her pulpier breakthrough films is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; stiffening and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, 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 earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
