Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel compelled to justify even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One drawback is that such accolades can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, 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 example has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, describing in something like real time the short interval 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 alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the countdown clock hits zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the perspectives of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel again and again, each pass trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so again it’s the responsibility of a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this screenplay presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
