Bestowed upon an elite few, the mantle 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 lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One disadvantage is that such titles can restrict a creative to a tight creative box, pursuing exclusively material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the frustration when a project fails to ignite is all the greater. A prominent instance has just reached Netflix in the film by Kathryn Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any indication – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has disappointed many, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the classic Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with the underrated mid-90s release Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, informed by the Rodney King case, which also served as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of 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 fame expanding, Bigelow – like her native country – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News chief who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, depicting in near real-time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and alerted to the White House situation room, heading for what everyone learns is its destination: downtown Chicago. In this opening segment, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this feature-length movie can possibly proceed once the timer reaches zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment repeatedly, each repetition layering on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a firm hold on action and consequence; her finest achievements as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the endgame; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the scenario revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to reflect on the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, extending to Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, exits prematurely, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to prevent the world’s end. The verve Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the director felt she had to restrain her risk-taking, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being thought unworthy; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes 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 a location outside of the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film depicts has been destroyed utterly.
