Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel obliged to justify even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A prominent instance has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the dangers of rejecting actuality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts 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 previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, en route towards what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the chronometer hits zero.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition trowelling on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Earlier 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 inciting incident is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the very second the film ends. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story takes for granted is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
