Bestowed upon a select group, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as an honor and a weight. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel pressured to justify even their weakest efforts. (The logic is that a lackluster film by a Noted Film-maker is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One downside is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material worthy of a Noted Film-maker; another is that the disappointment when a project doesn't spark is even more pronounced. A prominent instance has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one honor this season: that for Biggest Letdown.
Looking Back at the Filmmaker's Journey
To ascertain the reasons the film has failed to impress, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow built her reputation with a run of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the sprawling undead story Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A sharper insight of her direction of travel came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an intense future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King incident, which also doubled as a cautionary fable about the risks of rejecting actuality to find refuge in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her reputation growing, Bigelow – like her native country – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be interested in Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who scripted Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would strongly support a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is spotted on the radars of a United States outpost in Alaska and alerted to the executive briefing area, heading for what everyone learns is its target: downtown Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an fascinating time-based suspense: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the chronometer expires.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the prologue glimpsed or heard only in passing. In terms of construction, the film can’t develop: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to revisit that first reel repeatedly, every iteration layering on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Earlier 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 concluding action; the story becomes engaging at the precise instant the film ends. The personas 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 bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve plenty of opportunity to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as dully conventional, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist disappears, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that beginning part as possibly one more of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow brought to her more genre-oriented early hits vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the director felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and virtually solidifying as it unfolds, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been surpassed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this script presumes is that those holding roles of command would be trained specialists, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like fiercely engaged reflections on their moment, Dynamite – the first of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first registers on a radar, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
