🔗 Share this article

Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this perspective, film scholars may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One drawback is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A prominent example has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems assured of only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.

Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey

To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her artistic path came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an electrifying future-now thriller, shaped by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a warning tale about the dangers of escaping from the real world to take cover in the virtual realm. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing 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 broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, 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 drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would enthusiastically stump for a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)

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 mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly head once the timer expires.

The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, secretary of defence Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each pass trowelling on contested bureaucratic steps while edging everybody closer the dreaded big bang. Prior Bigelow films had a tight grip on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the inciting incident is also the final play; the narrative captivates at the exact moment the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for different reasons.

Stylistic and Conceptual Issues

While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the deleterious effect platform financing has had on the visual style of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite appeared as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her pulpier breakthrough films vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the film-maker 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 director’s terror of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by current, reshaping incidents. What this story presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, conscientious to the core and that the greatest danger to Chicago in late 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the earliest of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.