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 ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel compelled to justify even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Prestigious Auteur is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such titles can confine a creative to a tight creative box, seeking out material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile example 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 measure – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To understand why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an intense near-future drama, informed by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the perils of abandoning reality to seek shelter 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 following the turn of the millennium, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a artist following this path might be interested in Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who scripted Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One concept for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is spotted on the radars of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, heading for what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the timer hits zero.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the opening scene briefly seen or mentioned. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section multiple times, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works 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 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.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the situation revolves in shrinking loops, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve plenty of opportunity to consider the harmful influence platform financing has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so yet again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The verve Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it goes along, it’s not unexpected the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s newer films to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely outdated. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been blown to smithereens.
