Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, cinema analysts may feel pressured to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A notable example has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any indication – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the perils of abandoning reality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more alert to 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 homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the chronometer expires.
The response – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. 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 adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the feared explosion. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
