Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this prism, auteurist critics may feel obliged to make excuses for even their least successful efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the disappointment when a project falls flat is all the greater. A notable test case has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To understand why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of abandoning reality to take cover in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a artist following this path might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: the heart of Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while undertaking an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly go once the timer expires.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film then shifts between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each pass layering on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her finest achievements as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so once more it’s left to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the film-maker felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The dread A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been overtaken by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, deeply responsible and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their moment, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
