Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A high-profile test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons 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: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service 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 compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the timer expires.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her best films as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the story becomes engaging at the exact moment the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, 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 Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow brought to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the artist felt she had to curb her risk-taking, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
