Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such titles can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is all the greater. A high-profile example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, 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 former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
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 by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film concludes. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, 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 scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
