Bestowed upon an elite few, the designation 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 celebrated director through this perspective, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend 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 titles can restrict a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material suitable for a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent example has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any indication – seems assured of only one recognition this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has disappointed many, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. 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 contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film subsequently shuffles between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each pass adding on contested bureaucratic steps while moving all parties toward the anticipated detonation. Earlier 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 fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film fades to black. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the negative impact streaming budgets has had on the aesthetic of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite appeared as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 24 or The West Wing or modern platform releases employing identical backdrops, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker fades away, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so once more it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The fear A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; tensing up and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from a location outside of the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly behind the curve. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
