Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an celebrated director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their poorest efforts. (The reasoning is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still more valuable than the best work of a jobbing hack.) One drawback is that such honorifics can confine a creative to a constrained space, searching only for material befitting a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the dismay when a project falls flat is significantly amplified. A notable instance has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
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 succession of versatile and dynamic movies: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, shaped by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also functioned as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more attentive to this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her native country – was compelled to respond to external pressures. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s deep-seated legacy of racism.
It's easy to see why a film-maker on this trajectory might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One idea for the new film: imagine Oppenheimer in the present day?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unknown parties is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly proceed once the chronometer expires.
The response – and this is where the letdowns start – is a return to the start: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those higher-ups (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. In terms of construction, the film is unable to advance: it’s a two-hour movie with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, every iteration adding on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the feared explosion. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on stimulus and response; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the exact moment the film concludes. The characters 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 sufficient moments to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the visual style of Hollywood productions. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing recalling 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as potentially another of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s up to a collection of stern males to try to stop doomsday. The passion Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Underlying Anxiety and Overall Assessment
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; tensing up and practically fossilising as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this script assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, conscientious to the core and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end 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 latest projects to fall in the space between neglect, diversion and complete unimportance – instead spends two listless hours struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the stray rocket first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film depicts has been shattered completely.
