Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, film scholars may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful 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 drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A prominent test case has recently arrived on 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 destined for only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick 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 the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a moral story about the risks of rejecting actuality to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be interested in 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 strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly head once the countdown clock expires.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario cycles in diminishing returns, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; 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 offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; tensing up and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
