Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel compelled to justify even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any guide – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also doubled as a warning tale about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past 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 ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film can’t develop: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel multiple times, each repetition adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her finest achievements 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 narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The characters 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 ample time to ponder the harmful influence streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker disappears, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s strong female professionals, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, 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 qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first is detected, the America Bigelow’s film portrays has been destroyed utterly.
