Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such accolades can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a moral story about the perils of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, at work on 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 broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the countdown clock expires.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section repeatedly, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy 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 risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, 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 hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
