Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel compelled to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such titles can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her creative evolution came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a cautionary fable about the perils of rejecting actuality to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, 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 heated debate with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: downtown Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The outcome – and this is where the letdowns start – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, every iteration layering on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for distinct motivations.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve ample time to consider the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story assumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
