Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the beneficial side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, cinema analysts may feel compelled to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is significantly amplified. A high-profile test case has just reached Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed 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.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has failed to impress, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow established her acclaim with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, at work on the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her homeland – was forced on the defensive. 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 fractious conversation with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who scripted Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One pitch for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most effective early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a rocket sent somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is spotted on the radars 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 opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re left pondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the timer expires.
The response – 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 introduction glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a extended runtime with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, each repetition adding on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the very second the film ends. The characters are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to ponder the harmful influence platform financing has had on the look of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow infused into her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it unfolds, it’s understandable the film should have been overtaken by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those holding roles of command would be qualified professionals, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours scrabbling around hopelessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
