Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, film scholars may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile example has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
You can understand why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the countdown clock hits zero.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each repetition trowelling on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the triggering event is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the very second the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to reflect on the harmful influence platform financing has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
