Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the beneficial side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a not-so-heavy-hitter that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a warning tale about the dangers of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (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 fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – 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 summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation 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 – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
The Film's Strengths and Weaknesses
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this two-hour film can possibly go once the chronometer expires.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, every iteration layering on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the triggering event is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director disappears, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; tensing up and almost petrifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the biggest threat 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 time, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
