Bestowed upon an elite few, the title of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this lens, film scholars may feel obliged to justify even their weakest efforts. (The reasoning is that a lackluster film by a Prestigious Auteur is still better than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can limit a creative to a constrained space, pursuing exclusively material suitable for a Noted Film-maker; another is that the dismay 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 feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow earned her laurels with a series of versatile and dynamic movies: biker flick 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 more definite sign of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an electrifying near-future drama, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also doubled as a moral story about the dangers of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the virtual realm. (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 fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty tackled America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a heated debate with the country’s extended past of racism.
One can appreciate why a film-maker on this trajectory might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – written by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who penned Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Academy Awards dominance. (One pitch for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a US army base in Alaska and flagged to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while engaging in an compelling countdown strategy: we’re set to wondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the timer expires.
The answer – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the opening scene glimpsed or heard only in passing. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a extended runtime with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass layering on contested bureaucratic steps while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Earlier Bigelow films had a firm hold on stimulus and response; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were fundamentally focused on results. But here, the triggering event is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the very second the film concludes. The characters are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the plot revolves in shrinking loops, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve ample time to ponder the harmful influence Netflix money has had on the visual style of U.S. films. Even on the big screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s hasty mobile filming evoking 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 Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as potentially another of this director’s tough-minded working women, leaves the story too soon, so yet again it’s the responsibility of a cabal of frowning men to try to stop doomsday. The energy Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes disappears alongside her; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this dialogue-heavy required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; becoming rigid and almost petrifying as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been eclipsed by contemporary, reframing developments. What this story assumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent 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 first of this director’s newer films to fall in the space between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first registers on a radar, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
