Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel obliged to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To understand why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (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 reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the countdown clock expires.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president 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 a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration adding on debated technical details while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases reusing familiar locations, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this talky required some balancing visual flair.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; stiffening and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story takes for granted is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, 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 fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been blown to smithereens.
