Bestowed upon a select group, the designation 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 prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to defend even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Renowned Director is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A prominent test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
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: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a warning tale about the perils of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the platform would strongly support a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and flagged to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while undertaking an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly head once the timer expires.
The response – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. Structurally, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Earlier Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the negative impact platform financing has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The dread A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works 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 not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
